True Type Japanese fonts

[kevinsano]

Does anyone here know where I can find japanese encoded true type fonts?
I have a lot of creative ascii encoded hiragana and katakana fonts, but I really can't use them.

 

[GaijinPunch]

Only a few hundred sites here.

i2f has the best, IMHO. Amazing Flash as well. A pretty popular design house amongst Japanese design circles... at least according to the few I know.

 

[sl0815]

Hi,

you may want to try these:

ipafonts (should work in windows as well)
or
freefont


MfG Jan

 

[PaulTB]

mikachan

It's the only free Japanese true type font with kanji that I've come across.

Another trick you can do is get the MS Chinese font (I think it might be MS Song, but I forget) and use it with Japanese. It requires a bit of fiddling about but it's a good font.

 

[CorDarei]

I have on my Linux (Gentoo) system,

Kochi Gothic/Mincho
Sazanami Gothic/Mincho
Mikachan
Mona

and Ximian Open Office has a font called Toufuu (東風) that looks really nice, but it's hidden somewhere and I'm too lazy to find it. (Except for mikachan, all of the above are basically similar to MS Gothic/Mincho).

Also, I seem to remember that Arial Unicode had kanji/kana; I believe Microsoft owns the license for that as well as the MS Gothic/Mincho fonts.

After searching on Google for a few minutes, I found this site which may prove of interest:
Japanese fonts

 

[John Lemon]

The Japanese version of Windows XP has a few neat fonts such as "Kyokashotai". I tried hunting for them online but can't remember the exact kanji.

 

[sl0815]

I have on my Linux (Gentoo) system,

Kochi Gothic/Mincho
Sazanami Gothic/Mincho
Mikachan
Mona

Ohh, nice to see another Gentoo fellow. Where did you get the Sazanami font? I can't find it. Did you just emerged it?


MfG Jan

 

[CorDarei]

The Japanese version of Windows XP has a few neat fonts such as "Kyokashotai". I tried hunting for them online but can't remember the exact kanji.

教科書体

Windows版出力対応フォント集 - a list of fonts with samples

 

[GaijinPunch]

Ohh, nice to see another Gentoo fellow. Where did you get the Sazanami font? I can't find it. Did you just emerged it?

Try "emerge -s font" and you'll get a LOT of fonts... unfortunately not just Japanese. It should be in there, although I've not heard of that particular one.

 

[CorDarei]

try emerge -s sazanami. I forget the exact name of the ebuild, but it's in there.

 

[kevinsano]

thanks, the mikachan font is nice.

 

[sl0815]

try emerge -s sazanami. I forget the exact name of the ebuild, but it's in there.

It's the exact name. I overread it ... The font doesn't look bad and has many iso-8859-15 characters too. THX for the tip.

Just in case you didn't know: there is a package called esearch which is quite useful if you have to search something in the portage tree.


MfG Jan

 

[Malaika]

ahhh I'm having a hard time trying to download those fonts that you gave the links too...*frowns*

I need help! *pouts*

 

[Chabichou]

I do know of a site I recently found that has truetype japanese fonts

Japanese Unicode Fonts

I think it only recently came into existence.

Knock yourself out kids!

The files are zipped in lzh format but you can download a free program, lhasa to unzip them. Some of them are in exe files and some can be downloaded from an ftp site.

Edit: Actually, the site said that they are unicode fonts (is that true type?). The great thing about these fonts is that some of them support several languages. You can use the same one for arabic, chinese, korean, greek, hebrew, etc. Talk about convenience eh?

The site also has a multitude of fonts for other languages here: Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Just pick your language

Free, legal fonts! Yay!!!!!!




Anyway, I am specifically looking for the microsoft kyokashotai font that some of you have mentioned :
教科書体

There are several of them:
HG教科書体
HGP教科書体
HGS教科書体


Here is a list of all windows Japanese fonts: ＯＢ・ＯＧアンケートおよびメッセージ集の記入フォーマットダウンロードのページ

Please, if anyone has it could they, refer me to a website that has it for download. Please. Someone out there must have the Japanese version of windows, and hence would have all those fonts on the list I provided.

 

[Sensuikan San]

Super links Chabichou !

You've just made me want to learn to read Japanese even more than before!

So ... for the rest of the afternoon, ...... I'm gonna .... download .......

(.... Go away! ... I'm busy .....!)

ジョン

 

[kumo]

In my opinion the best Japanese font ever made is "meiryo" (メイリオ), which will be the new Windows vista's default font. I don't think I'm allowed to post it here, but you can easily download it from 2ch if you want.

 

[Chabichou]

I thought I might add that many Chinese fonts support Japanese as well. Since most Japanese characters are exactly like their Chinese counterparts, they have the same code on computers, so both Chinese and Japanese fonts work on the same characters. And since the Chinese have all the kanji, it can support all Japanese kanji, except for those few characters that have been altered from the original Chinese. Of course, Japanese fonts only support about 2000 kanji, so they will only work on a small Chinese character percentage. Also, many Chinese fonts (but not all of them, mind you) support hiragana and katakana.

Why am I referring you to Chinese fonts? Because it's a lot easier to get free Chinese fonts on the internet, and you get a wider variety as well. You can actually type "Chinese fonts" on google, and you will be linked to websites with Chinese fonts up for download.

It's easy to get these fonts to work in ms word, but it's a bit tricky to get the Chinese fonts to work on Japanese in word pad. Here's how I do it. I type what I want in Japanese. I make sure that the font is Arial Unicode ms, then I highlight the characters and choose instead of Japanese encoding, Chinese encoding. Then you can apply a Chinese font to them. Many Chinese fonts also support hiragana and katakana. Just make sure to apply Chinese encoding to everything before you change the font.

Here is a pdf file showing which Chinese fonts support Japanese characters. Note that there are traditional Chinese fonts and simplified Chinese fonts.

 

[kumo]

Of course, japanese fonts only support about 2000 kanji, so they will only work on a small percentage of chinese characters.

I don't think this is correct. Link.

The most popularly-used Japanese character set is known as JIS X 0208-1990. It includes 6879 characters, among which are the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, 6355 kanji, the Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, the numerals, and a number of typographic symbols.

I'm not sure about Chinese fonts though...