Kochi (東風フォント) was a font development project to build free replacements of proprietary fonts such as MS Gothic or
MS Mincho
This is a list of notable CJK fonts (computer fonts which contain a large range of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters). These fonts are primarily sorted by their typeface, the main classes being "with serif", "without serif" and "script". In th ...
, developed by
Yasuyuki Furukawa (古川 泰之). The project consisted of the Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts. It was released in the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...
.
Plagiarism controversy
The Kochi
Mincho font began as an outline version of a
raster font
A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...
known as Watanabe (渡邊). This version was deprecated in 2003 after it was discovered by Hiroki Kanou, one of the developers, that Watanabe was largely copied from a commercial font, TypeBank Mincho-M; while it was not clear that any law was being broken, the developers were not interested in working with plagiarised material.
While Hitachi, who claimed to own the TypeBank font, had announced that they were willing to permit its restricted use in Linux systems,
Press release
(Japanese) the direction preferred was to discontinue the old Kochi fonts and replace them with new versions that did not contain any of the plagiarised characters. The new font family was called Kochi-substitute: it retained the old Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho font names, but the file names were changed to kochi-gothic-subst.ttf
and kochi-mincho-subst.ttf
, respectively.
Kochi-Substitute is currently a part of the efont project, maintained by Hiroki Kanou.
Kochi-Substitute character sources
The outlines of kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...
and Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
glyphs in Kochi Gothic come from the old Kochi font project for kana and Latin-based characters. Greek and Cyrillic glyphs were built specifically for Kochi-Substitute by Uchida (内田).
For other characters, Kochi Mincho uses the Wadalab Mincho (和田研明朝) outline.
Kochi Gothic uses Wadalab Gothic for JIS X 0208
JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...
characters and Wadalab Maru for JIS X 0212
JIS X 0212 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a coded character set for encoding supplementary characters for use in Japanese. This standard is intended to supplement JIS X 0208 (Code page 952). It is numbered 953 or 5049 as an IBM code ...
characters.
Kochi Gothic uses embedded bitmaps from following:
* Naga 10 for 10-pixel font, Shinonome12 for 12-pixel font, k14goth for 14-pixel font, Shinonome 16 for 16-pixel font, Ayu 20dot Font (東風) for 20-pixel font.
Kochi Mincho uses embedded bitmaps from following:
* Naga 10 for 10-pixel font, Shinonome12 for 12-pixel font, Tachibana font (橘フォント, k14) for 14-pixel font, Shinonome 16 for 16-pixel font, Kappa 20dot Font for 20-pixel font.
Each font contains 15365 glyphs (14755 characters). Many characters (including most Latin-1 Supplement characters) are, however, not visible.
Both fonts also support following code pages: 1252 (Latin 1), 1250 (Latin 2), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1254 (Turkish), 1257 (Windows Baltic), 932 (JIS/Japan), Reserved for OEM, 865 (MS-DOS Nordic), 863 (MS-DOS Canadian French), 861 (MS-DOS Icelandic), 857 (MS-DOS IBM Turkish), 852 (Latin 2), 775 (MS-DOS Baltic), 850 (WE/Latin 1), 437 (US).
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
layout tables support Vertical Writing for kana under default and Japanese languages.
See also
* List of CJK fonts
This is a list of notable CJK fonts ( computer fonts which contain a large range of Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters). These fonts are primarily sorted by their typeface, the main classes being "with serif", "without serif" and "script". In th ...
References
Open Development of Open Font
Slashdot Japan article
efont project
{{Free and open-source typography
Open-source typefaces
CJK typefaces