Raising the dead: Morisawa breathes life into the Sha-Ken font library

In January 2021, Morisawa and Sha-Ken announced they would ‘co-develop’ the Sha-Ken font library for OpenType (English press release here), due for release in 2024 in celebration of the Japanese typesetter they created 100 years ago. The founders of Morisawa (Nobuo Morisawa) and Sha-Ken (Mokichi Ishii) co-created the first modern Japanese typesetter in 1924 but quickly became 2 different family companies. By the late 1970’s Sha-Ken had become the dominate force of the Japanese pre-press market with the largest and most sought after font library, but in the 1980’s it unraveled.

Sha-Ken never made the transition to digital pre-press and PostScript fonts, which Morisawa did with its very profitable licensing agreement with Adobe. When Sha-Ken announced OpenType fonts at the 2011 International eBook Expo, it was a ghost of a company run into the ground by greed and incompetence. They never delivered on that promise. As the former Sha-Ken lead font engineer told me, there was no font engineer talent left in the company to do the job of re-creating the proprietary digital format library into OpenType.

When Sha-Ken was finally free of the founder family and their incompetent management, in 2018, they became of real estate holding company and cut a deal with Morisawa. But let’s be real, Sha-Ken has nothing to do with the print market. They do not sell or produce any products. They no longer have the font engineering talent to bring their legacy font library back from the dead and into the digital era.

Morisawa has a very talented font development team, they even bought Jiyukobo, ex-Sha-Ken font designers and creators of the Hiragino Japanese system fonts used in macOS and iOS. An interesting side story: Apple negotiated with Sha-Ken to purchase their library shortly after Steve Jobs returned but it never came to be. Jeff Martin, who led the effort at the time should be proud of today’s announcement.

It’s hard to emphasize how important this development is. Imagine the LinoType library, or classic standards like Helvetica, New York, etc. were never licensed as digital fonts…until now. The release will not use the OpenType Variable Font format due to cost and time restraints. No Japanese font vendor has yet to release anything in variable font format so far, there’s no real market for it.

The Morisawa led “co-development” team has had to prioritize and edit: the Sha-Ken library is huge and only a small subset ever made it onto proprietary Sha-Ken digital typesetters, the bulk of the library is analog and and pre-computer era glyph sets. There are huge glyph variation and feature holes to fill. Getting a simplified basic Sha-Ken library in OpenType Adobe Japan 1-3 glyph collection format is a tremendous job.

The Sha-Ken 100 (aka raising the dead)
Morisawa finally announced Sha-Ken OpenType font release details on February 14, 2024. They plan to, eventually, release 100 Sha-Ken fonts in honor the 100th anniversary of the Japanese phototypesetter. In 2024 we get 43 fonts. The most important is the 3 ‘improved’ Ishii fonts: Ryumin L / R / M / B, Gothic L / R / M / B, Old-Style Kana L / R / M / B. These are tweaked designs as the originals were conceived and designed in the analog photo-typesetter era and compensated for softening effect of film to plate. They don’t always look as they were intended to look when ported straight to digital format (also an issue with photo-typesetter era designed Hiragino by the way). These improved Ishii family fonts will have smallish ‘standard’ Adobe Japan 1-3 9,499 character sets, far smaller than the 20,327 extended character sets found in macOS/iOS Hiragino.

The bulk of the release will be 29 ‘classic’ fonts that show how dead the Sha-Ken font library was: a measly 4,833 characters, a subset, half really, of the long obsolete Adobe Japan-1 character set created in 1983 for PostScript fonts that are now also dead.

Better than nothing but no surprise given the gross neglect of the Sha-Ken font library, basically nothing after 1980. It is just as former lead Sha-Ken font engineer Tomihisa Uchida warned me years ago, the library will have to be recreated from the ground up. More like resurrected from the grave.

Good luck to the Sha-Ken font project team (which includes former Sha-Ken font designer Osamu Torinoumi who also designed Hiragino), given limited resources and talent, they’ll need it. Certainly nothing is coming from Sha-Ken as all the font engineering and design talent left long ago, the ‘co-development’ label is a face saving move and nothing else. It will be a some time before an improved and thoroughly modernized Sha-Ken 100 library will be coming to a desktop computer near you.

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Also see: History of Sha-Ken and Morisawa Photo Typesetter development (great article by a Japanese desginer written in German!)