Styles

Ascender provides two main type styles for Japanese fonts which are similar to serif and sans serif style for Latin fonts. Mincho is a Japanese font style that has small serifs at the end of strokes and is used extensively for book and newspaper publishing The Mincho style would be similar to Times New Roman. This same style is called Sung for Chinese fonts. Japanese fonts that are in the Gothic style feature plain strokes with little or no serifs, similar to the Arial typeface. Gothic Japanese font styles work well for on-screen legibility.

Unicode

Ascender has extensive experience providing Japanese fonts in variety of formats and encodings. The most common encoding that developers utilize for Japanese fonts and other CJK fonts is Unicode. Unicode is an encoding standard which includes many characters, including Unified Han Ideographs and others essential for writing Asian languages. Although Unicode has been the preferred method for CJK and Japanese font encoding, Ascender has also delivered font data in other encodings, including Microsoft’s Shift JIS.

Ascender also provides Japanese (Kanji) fonts which have many different character sets and encodings. Kanji is a Japanese font writing system based on modified Chinese characters. Kanji fonts generally support the four major writing systems used in Japan: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romaji. The Shift JIS encoding is Microsoft’s encoding for a Japanese character set containing approximately 7000 characters. Many software and hardware developers ask to match the Microsoft Character set when shipping Japanese fonts. Ascender is also proud to offer IBM's Heisei fonts for license to software and hardware developers. The three Heisei fonts are an industry standard in Japan and recognized for their typographic quality.

Please contact us to discuss with us your needs for Japanese multilingual fonts.