Japanese Fonts

The 10 Japanese fonts span 4 structural categories: 7 display, 1 decorative, 1 handwriting and 1 sans serif. The largest group, 7 display fonts, is more than half of the page; all of them are also on Display Fonts. 1 of the 10 is in the free collection (Marker Quick), so a free account can download it as TTF; the other 9 download with Pro, Studio or a Font Pass. Weights are not where these Japanese fonts differ: all 10 come as one Regular style each. The tags they share most, after the page's own, are bold with 8, geometric with 8, poster with 8 and retro with 7. Some are drawn on one letter structure: Foyer Inline, Rally Sans and Snowdrift differ only in effect, slant or width, and 7 fonts here belong to such groups.

2 of the 4 fonts whose slant could be measured lean right, by a median of about 6°, while 2 stand upright. The steepest is Turbo Round at about 8°; the other 6 have strokes too varied to give one angle. Widths vary a lot: an average lowercase letter runs from 67.8% of the cap height in Civic Sans to 104.7% in Sunset Shadow. The page median is 97.2%, 20% wider than the 80.8% median of the whole library, so the same words take a longer line than in an average library font. Measured against their capitals, the Japanese fonts here put the top of the lowercase between 69.4% and 82.3% of the cap height, 78.5% at the median; the library median is 71.6%. How dark a line of these Japanese fonts looks ranges from 17% ink coverage in Orbit Outline up to 49.9% in Lava Groove; the median here, 42.8%, is 25% darker than the library's 34.3%. Of the 4 whose stroke contrast could be read from the o, all 4 keep close to one stroke weight in every direction. 7 of the 10 carry an effect drawn into every letter: 3D extrusion on 1, inline on 1, outline on 1, drop shadow on 1, snow cap on 1, stripe on 1 and varsity outline on 1.

In Japanese kana itself the set is even: each of the 10 measured fonts has the same 170 Japanese kana characters. Every measured font can set the whole Japanese test line "いろはにほへと ちりぬるを", which its font page shows in the font itself. 1 pairs Japanese kana with Latin alone (Marker Quick), while the rest also carry Chinese, useful when one design has to work across several languages. Beyond Latin, 10 fonts cover Japanese kana and 9 cover Chinese; the largest character set is Turbo Round's 3,329, the smallest 273. 9 of the 10 include accented Latin letters beyond A to Z; the other 1 stops at the basic alphabet, so check names with accents in the preview first. 9 of the 10 adjust spacing with kerning pairs (a median of 88); Snowdrift has the most, 274. In the OpenType tables, none has OpenType ligatures or alternates; as for numbers, none has tabular figures, so columns of numbers will not align exactly.