Meiryo
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| Typeface | Meiryo |
|---|---|
| Category | Sans-serif |
| Designer(s) | Eiichi Kono, Takeharu Suzuki, Matthew Carter, Tom Rickner |
| Foundry | C&G Inc. |
Meiryo (メイリオ) is a Japanese typeface part of the new suite of fonts that come with Microsoft Windows Vista. It is a sans-serif and gothic font (respectively for Latin and Japanese characters). It is aimed at replacing MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install.
It was decided that a new Japanese font was needed as the result of the current ones (mainly MS Gothic and MS Mincho) being incompatible with Microsoft's ClearType subpixel rendering technology[citation needed], which aims to increase legibility of characters on LCD screens. ClearType has been available in Windows for Latin fonts since the release of Windows XP. However, unlike Latin fonts which use the ClearType hinting system for all sizes, the Japanese fonts distributed with Windows include embedded bitmaps versions of the fonts in small sizes. Although fonts using only hinted CJK glyphs exist (such as Arial Unicode), they had not been distributed with Windows until Vista.
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[edit] Characteristics
The font was designed as the enhanced version of Verdana, which was regarded as a highly readable font. To improve readability when mixing Latin and CJK texts, the font's baseline was slightly raised.
In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded bitmap glyphs are used whenever font size is set to around 9pt. Unlike previous fonts designed for CJK environments, Meiryo contains no embedded bitmaps. To improve readability under small font sizes without using embedded bitmaps, TrueType hinting language was used for stroke-reduction. Similar technology was used on MingLiu and PMingLiu versions 5.03.
Meiryo is developed to comply with JIS X 0213:2004, and can also use the newest set of personal name characters provided by Minister of Justice. In addition, it contains OpenType tables for JIS78, JIS83, JIS90 forms for legacy usages.
Meiryo supports following OpenType layout features for Cyrillic, Greek, Han Ideographic, Kana, Latin scripts: nalt, afrc, dnom, dlig, frac, fwid, hwid, hkna, ital, jp78, jp83, jp90, numr, qwid, ruby, sinf, zero, smcp, c2sc, liga, sups, twid, vkna, vrt2, vert, kern.
The font also contains glyphs not normally accessible without font editor. These glyphs include circled 00, 51-100; negative circled 00, 21-100, a-z, A-Z, kana; (rounded) square-enclosed characters, negative (rounded) square-enclosed characters; 2x2 CJK words.
Meiryo glyphs for kanji and kana have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100.
Because Japanese is a language that has not been traditionally italicized, the italic version of Meiryo only provides italicized glyphs for the Latin alphabet.
[edit] Availability
For Microsoft Windows, Meiryo is distributed as two TrueType Collection files, with regular and bold glyphs stored in separate files. Each file also contains an italic variant of the font.
For Windows Vista, the font is included with the operating system.
For Windows XP, the font has become available free of charge by obtaining the Japanese version of Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and electing to install the Microsoft Silverlight runtime. Downloading and installing the Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP from Microsoft also makes Meiryo available on Windows XP.
Aside from Microsoft Windows, it is also distributed with Japanese version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.
[edit] Authors
The Japanese characters of Meiryo were designed by C&G Inc and Eiichi Kono, who also redesigned Johnston font which is now used by London Underground as New Johnston. The Latin characters were designed by Matthew Carter, creator of the Verdana font, and are visibly similar to characters from Verdana. By having a font designed by a combination of Japanese and Latin experts, Microsoft strived to make a font in which English and Japanese would present well together when sitting side-by-side on the screen. Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation did extensive programming and font hinting for Meiryo. Rickener helped create the first TrueType fonts at Apple and did all the font hinting for Microsoft’s Georgia and Verdana fonts. According to Rickner, Meiryo is one of the first Japanese fonts created on and for the computer screen and took 2 years to create and engineer.
[edit] About the name
The name of the font Meiryo (メイリオ meirio) comes from the Japanese word Meiryō (明瞭) [meːɺ̠ʲoː], which means "clarity". This refers to the fact that ClearType will make text written in Meiryo appear clearer on screen. The Japanese spelling メイリオ is taken from the English pronunciation [ˈmeɪriˌoʊ] (the Japanese spelling in hiragana would have been めいりょう, with the katakana "equivalent" メイリョウ).
According to Eiichi Kono, the name was chosen for its exotic-sounding pronunciation, and being more compact.[1]
[edit] Problems
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- At small sizes, dimensions of kanji characters are not even.
- At small sizes, stroke reduction is not consistent with the methods used by other fonts such as MS Gothic.
- At sizes below 6 points, unlike the Verdana font upon which it was based, Meriyo is not smoothed unless ClearType is activated.
- At font sizes between 11 and 13 points (96 dpi), glyphs have inconsistent stroke weight unless ClearType is activated.
- When italicized, only Latin characters are slanted, not CJK ideographs and kana. According to Microsoft, Meiryo uses a customized version of Verdana for italics instead of the generic slanting method.[2] Although the font includes an OpenType table for Italics, this feature only substitutes glyphs already included in the font, instead of applying transformation effects to the affected glyphs. Since Meiryo only has Italic glyphs for Latin, Greek, Coptic, and Cyrillic characters, it is an indication that Windows Vista does not use emulated italic effects if it uses a substitute font for italic effect, but cannot find the correct glyph in the italic font. Similarly, most of the OpenType tables used in the font (except kern) only work if substitute glyphs are available inside the font.
- Although it is a proportional font, this is not indicated in Windows font lists.
- Meiryo uses greater line spacing than Verdana for which Meiryo incorporates, as well as Segoe families and other East Asian fonts, including the new fonts shipped with Windows Vista.
- Glyphs for triple and quadruple dash box-drawing characters all have six dashes. Furthermore, when using OpenType's half-width features, all horizontal dash box-drawing characters have three dashes.
- Because of its compliance with JIS X 0213:2004, variant glyphs have different stroke layouts from the ones used in older MS Gothic and other conventional fonts. To use older glyphs in a web page, it needs to be activated manually.[3] However, Meiryo is not alone for being criticized of following the standards. MingLiU and PMingLiU version 5.03 follow the standards set by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and the reference rendering used in Unicode documents, which also causes dissatisfaction among users.[4] However, in the case of MingLiU update, version 5 does not have embedded bitmap fonts for small sizes, and the update pack does not include uninstall feature. On the other hand, MS Gothic, MS PGothic, MS UI Gothic, MS Mincho, MS PMincho can be updated to version 5.00, which include JIS X 0213:2004 support to match the glyphs used in Meiryo, and also incorporated JIS90 Forms OpenType Layout Table for users preferring the old glyphs.[5] For Vista users, Microsoft also offered an update to make MS Gothic and MS Mincho font families to use glyphs in JIS X 0208-1990.[6]
[edit] Awards
Tokyo Type Directors club awarded 2007 Type design prize to Eiichi Kono, C&G Inc (Satoru Akamoto, Takeharu Suzuki, Yukiko Ueda), Matthew Carter on Meiryo font.[7]
[edit] References
- ^ ITmedia News：2年がかりの新日本語フォント「メイリオ」
- ^ Fonts (Segoe UI)
- ^ 加藤さん: メイリオ(Meiryo)とＭＳ 明朝、ＭＳ ゴシック、Windows Vista - Fonts update
- ^ [1][2]
- ^ Microsoft Windows Vista:Windows XP および Windows Server 2003 向けJIS2004 対応 MS ゴシック & MS 明朝フォントパッケージについて
- ^ Microsoft Windows Vista: Windows Vista および Windows Server 2008 向け MS ゴシック・明朝フォントパッケージについて
- ^ Meiryo
- ClearType page at Microsoft Design
- メイリオ on the Japanese Wikipedia
- Channel9 interview with Cleartype Team
- Design Meets Technology
