Minchō
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Minchō typeface (明朝楷書, minchō-kaisho) is a category of typefaces used in printing Chinese characters. This category of typeface has traditionally been called Song typeface (宋體; sòng tǐ) in China. It is currently the most used typeface category for Japanese and Chinese, possibly Korean as well.
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[edit] History of Song Typeface in China
The printing press appeared in China during the Song Dynasty. At the time, each print block contained two portrait-oriented pages placed side by side. The print blocks were all cut from rectangular planks such that the wood grain ran horizontally. Because the grain ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve patterns with the grain, like horizontal strokes. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and very easily break. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes. To prevent wear and tear, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened. These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface.
The Song typeface was already in full production during the Song Dynasty; however, it was not mature. More popular typefaces at the time were those that imitated Chinese calligraphy styles (e.g. 顏體、柳體、歐體). It was not until the Ming Dynasty, as wood price increased, that the Song typeface become more popular because it can be carved into smaller sizes than the other typefaces. This font has changed so little since the Song Dynasty that people during the Ming Dynasty nicknamed it the "static typeface." Also during the Ming Dynasty, this typeface spread to Japan and Korea, and it was since known in those countries as the Ming typeface.
The Song typeface is still called the Song typeface (宋體; sòng tǐ) in mainland China. However, the typeface was reintroduced in Taiwan from Japan as the Ming typeface (明體; míng tǐ) for modern printing presses.
[edit] Japan
In Japanese text, Hiragana, Katakana, and the Latin alphabet are also used. Possessing variable line weight and characteristic decorations at the end of lines similar to serifs, minchō-style type is comparable to Western serif typefaces, as opposed to the Gothic styles which are comparable to sans-serif. It is the most commonly used style in print. In Japan there are several variants of the Minchō style, such as the textbook style or the newspaper style.
Minchō type is characterised, among other things, by the following:
- Thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes
- Triangular ornaments at the end of single horizontal strokes called uroko (literally "fish scales")
- Overall geometrical regularity
These characteristics are visible in the example in fig. 1.
The name Minchō means Ming Dynasty, which was the era during which movable type printing (invented in the eleventh century) flourished in China, and during which Minchō-style type was first created. The creator of modern Japanese movable-type printing, Motoki Shōzō (or Motogi), modeled his sets of type after those prevailing in China, having learned an electrolytic method of type manufacturing from the American William Gamble in 1869. Motoki then created, based on Gamble's frequency studies of characters in the Chinese Bible, a full set of type with added Japanese characters.
Strictly speaking, only kanji are thus printed in Minchō type. However, modern type sets (that is, digital fonts) almost always include glyphs for kana script characters in a matching variable-line-width style, usually in a precise style imitating calligraphic handwriting with a brush. In its modern role comparable to that of western serif fonts, both kana and Roman glyphs are usually part of a complete type set.
There is some variation between the printed and handwritten forms of many kanji, especially in the orientation of smaller strokes and the shape of certain radicals. Some of these differences are persistent and specific to printed type (or even the minchō style), but others may be no more significant than variations between individual typefaces. None of these variations usually hinder reading. However, a special style of Minchō type (kyōkashotai or textbook type) matching the recommended handwritten forms is used in primary school textbooks, in order to prevent confusion among children learning kanji.
Well-known modern-day minchō typefaces include the Morisawa foundry's "Ryūbundō Minchō" (Ryūmin) as well as Adobe's "Kozuka Mincho" family, designed by Kozuka Masahiko (also creator of the popular gothic font "ShinGo").
[edit] Korea
In Korean, a similar category of typeface for the Korean alphabet hangul was called myeongjo (the Korean reading for the same Chinese characters "明朝") until recently, influenced by the Japanese term. A Ministry of Culture-sponsored standardization of typography terms in 1993 replaced myeongjo with batang, the Korean word for "foundation" or "ground" (as opposed to "figure"), and this is the term now current.
[edit] Mincho typefaces in computing
Japanese typefaces commonly seen in computing include:
- MS Mincho, MS PMincho — distributed by Microsoft with its Windows operating system.
- Kochi Mincho — included with a number of Linux distributions; also notable for being a fixed width font (at least for printing Korean Hangul).
- Hiragino Minchō Pro — included in two weights in recent versions of Mac OS, it is possibly the only publishing-quality Minchō typeface to ship with a computer operating system. It covers almost all of the Adobe Japan 1-5 glyph collection.
Chinese versions include:
- MingLiU, PMingLiU - distributed by Microsoft with its Windows operating system.
- SimSun, NSimSun - distributed by Microsoft with its Windows operating system.
Korean versions include:
- Batang, BatangChe, Gungsuh, GungsuhChe - distributed by Microsoft with its Windows operating system.
