Meiryo

Meiryo
Category Sans-serif
Designer(s) C&G Inc., Eiichi Kōno, Takeharu Suzuki (Katakana, Hiragana, and Chinese Character), Matthew Carter, Tom Rickner (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic)
Foundry Microsoft Typography
Trademark Meiryo is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Meiryo (メイリオ Meirio) is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems.

It was decided that a new Japanese font was needed, as the current ones (mainly MS Gothic and MS Mincho) are incompatible with Microsoft's ClearType subpixel rendering technology: Meiryo is intended to increase legibility of characters on LCD screens. ClearType has been available in Windows for Latin fonts since the release of Windows XP in October 2001. However, unlike Latin fonts which use the ClearType hinting system for all sizes, the Japanese fonts distributed with Windows included embedded bitmap versions of the fonts in small sizes. Although fonts using only hinted CJK glyphs exist (such as Arial Unicode MS), they had not been distributed with Windows prior to Vista.

Meiryo UI

Meiryo UI is a version that uses condensed kana, introduced with Windows 7[1] and is also available as an update in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Similar to MS Gothic, the Meiryo UI fonts are bundled with the same Meiryo TTC files of respective weights.

Meiryo UI update is also available for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.[2]

Characteristics

Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of Verdana, regarded as a highly readable font. The font's baseline was raised slightly to improve readability when mixing Latin and CJK texts. Meiryo glyphs for kanji and kana also have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100.

In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded bitmap glyphs are used whenever font size is set to around 9 points. 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 the Japanese 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.

Meiryo also contains glyphs not normally accessible without a 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.

The italic version of Meiryo only provides italicized glyphs for the Latin alphabet as written Japanese is traditionally not italicized.

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.

As stated earlier, the font is included with the Windows Vista 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.

Meiryo is also distributed with Japanese version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office 2013.

Authors

The Japanese characters of Meiryo were designed by C&G Inc. and Eiichi Kōno, who also redesigned the Johnston font which is now used by London Underground as New Johnston. The Latin characters were designed by Matthew Carter, the British-born 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 font experts, Microsoft strived to create a font in which written English and Japanese could present themselves well together side-by-side on the screen. American Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation did extensive programming and font hinting for Meiryo. Rickner 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 two years to create and engineer.

About the name

The font name comes from the Japanese word Meiryō (明瞭) [meːɽjoː], which means "clarity", referring to ClearType making text written in Meiryo appear clearer on the screen. The Japanese spelling メイリオ is taken from the English pronunciation /ˈmɛəri./; the actual Japanese spelling of 明瞭 in katakana is メイリョウ.

According to Eiichi Kōno, the name was chosen for its exotic-sounding pronunciation and its compactness.[3]

Although it is a proportional font, the font name does not contain a 'P' to indicate this in Windows font lists, as with MS Pゴシック and MS P明朝.

Problems

Awards

Tokyo Type Directors club awarded 2007 Type design prize to Eiichi Kōno, C&G Inc (Satoru Akamoto, Takeharu Suzuki, Yukiko Ueda), and Matthew Carter for the Meiryo font.[10]

See also

References

External links