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 […]
Inside Hiragino: A Closeup of Apple’s macOS Japanese Font
This article was originally published in Seybold Reports Volume 2, Number 18, December 2002 issue under the title, “Inside Hiragino: A Closeup of Apple’s OS X Japanese Font.” It contains interviews with Osamu Torinoumi, one of the lead Hiragino font designers after being introduced to him by then Dainippon Screen […]
WWDC outlook for a San Francisco C+J+K Apple Font
This is not a WWDC23 prediction, but at some point Apple will certainly unveil a variable San Francisco CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) system font to match the rest of the Apple SF font family, and it will be unveiled at WWDC. I’m not a fan of the CJK name and the mental […]
Refurbishing classic Japanese text for the digital age
One of my favorite work tasks is bringing classic Nichiren Shu Japanese texts into the digital age so they can be translated easily or republished using the latest print technologies for paper and ebooks. Before a title goes into production there are essential steps of obtaining the basic text in […]
The curse of Japanese PostScript fonts will live on: outline your outlines
I have not used Adobe Illustrator much the past few years and certainly don’t use it enough to justify buying a Creative Suite subscription that only lasts 12 months. Recently a localization project came in where I needed to edit the original Illustrator file data text. The printer sent me […]