is a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

sans-serif

gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces

MS Gothic MS, ms, Ms, M.S., etc. may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Ms.'' (magazine), an American feminist magazine * Metal Storm (webzine), a heavy metal website based in Estonia Businesses and organizations * MS-13, criminal gang * Missionaries ...

as the default system font for

Vista Vista usually refers to a distant view. Vista may also refer to: Software *Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007 * VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) ...

on Japanese systems. Meiryo was created out of a growing need for legible CJK fonts compatible with Microsoft

ClearType ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for addit ...

hinting Font hinting (also known as instructing) is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible tex ...

and

subpixel rendering Subpixel rendering is a way to increase the apparent resolution of a computer's liquid crystal display (LCD) or organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display by rendering pixels to take into account the screen type's physical properties. It takes ...

system. It was meant to increase the legibility of Japanese text on

LCD screen A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but i ...

s, and would thus take the place of

and

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 ...

, both of which had been widely used at the time. While most Latin fonts were able to use hinting at any size, most CJK fonts were incompatible with the technology (with the exception of some fonts such as

Arial Unicode MS In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus suppo ...

). Meiryo did away with embedding bitmap images into fonts for use at small sizes, a strategy employed by many CJK fonts (including MS Gothic and MS Mincho) to compensate for a lack of hinting support.

Meiryo UI

Meiryo UI is a version that uses condensed

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 reduced line height compared to Meiryo, introduced with

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

and is also available as an update in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Similar to

, the Meiryo UI fonts are bundled with the same Meiryo TTC files of respective weights.

Characteristics

Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of

Verdana Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typograph ...

, 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 are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

and kana also have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100. In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

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 TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

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 JIS X 0213 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining coded character sets for encoding the characters used in Japan. This standard extends JIS X 0208. The first version was published in 2000 and revised in 2004 (JIS2004) and 2012. As well as a ...

:2004 and can also use the newest set of personal name characters provided by the Japanese Minister of Justice. In addition, it contains

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 ...

tables for JIS78, JIS83, JIS90 forms for legacy usages. Meiryo supports following OpenType layout features for Cyrillic,

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, Han Ideographic,

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 ...

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 ...

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 has no concept of an italic font.

Availability

For Microsoft Windows, Meiryo is distributed as two

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 Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

operating system. For

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

, 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 Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. W ...

runtime. Downloading and installing the Japanese ClearType fonts for

from Microsoft also makes Meiryo available on

. Meiryo is also distributed with Japanese version of

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Mac OS X. It supersedes Office 2004 for Mac (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Office 2007. Office 2008 was develop ...

, 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 The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or by its nickname the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England. The ...

as New Johnston. The Latin characters were designed by

Matthew Carter Matthew Carter (born 1 October 1937) is a British type designer.Christophe_Plantin.html" ;"title="y Christophe Plantin">y Christophe Plantin' in typography's golden age was in perfect condition (some muddle aside) long withPlantin's accoun ...

, the British-born creator of the

font, and are visibly similar to characters from

. By having a font designed by a combination of Japanese and Latin font experts,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

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 Thomas Rickner (born October 8, 1966, Rochester, New York) is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating syst ...

Ascender Corporation Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and font ...

did extensive programming and font hinting for Meiryo. Rickner helped create the first

fonts at

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

and did all the font hinting for

’s

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

and

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'' () , which means "clarity", referring to ClearType making text written in Meiryo appear clearer on the screen. The Japanese spelling is taken from the English pronunciation ; the actual Japanese spelling in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

is . According to Eiichi Kōno, the name was chosen for its exotic-sounding pronunciation and its compactness. 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 Gothic () and MS P Minchō ().

Problems

* At small sizes, dimensions of printed kanji characters are not even. However, small-size kanji rendering has been traditionally problematic involving trade-offs in legibility and other factors like spacing. That was fixed in Meiryo version 6 included with

. * Sized between 11 and 13 points (96 dpi), glyphs have inconsistent stroke weight without the activation of

. Sometimes, especially on the

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

and Linux platforms, these problems can sometimes be avoided by displaying fonts in semi-bold or bold as their normal (lightest) font weight. * At small sizes, stroke reduction is not consistent with the methods used by other fonts such as

. * Because of its compliance with Japanese Industrial Standard for encoding

:2004, variant characters have different stroke layouts from the ones used in older

and other conventional fonts. To use older characters in a web page, for example, Meiryo needs to be activated manually. (MingLiU and PMingLiU version 5.03 follow the standards set by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and the reference rendering used in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

documents, which also causes similar dissatisfaction among users. On the other hand,

, MS PGothic, MS UI Gothic,

, MS PMincho can be updated to version 5.00, which include

:2004 support to match the characters used in Meiryo, and also incorporated JIS90 Forms

Layout Table for users preferring the old glyphs. For

users, Microsoft also offered an update to make

and

font families to use characters in

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 ...

-1990.) * When italicized, only Latin characters are slanted, not

CJK characters In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which include Chinese characters and derivatives in their writing systems, sometimes paired with other scripts. Collectively, th ...

and kana.

use other methods of emphasis or quotation indication; thus differing from, for example, the typefaces of

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

(unrelated distinctions between cursive and non-cursive and other traditional writing styles do exist). Nowadays, however, italicization is used in advertising but usually combined with other, common forms of emphasis, such as bold weight, exclamation marks, and, in Japanese,

use. Academic texts, for example, do not use italicized

as opposed to those in non-CJK languages, e.g. in traditionally

Latin-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

encoded European languages that use italics for things like inline quotations. Since these traditions of italicization do not exist in CJK, the decisions made for Meiryo is based on the existing general use. According to Microsoft, Meiryo uses a customized version of

for italics instead of the generic slanting method. Although the font includes an

table for italics, this feature only substitutes characters already included in the font, instead of applying transformation effects to the affected characters. Since Meiryo only has italic characters for Latin, Greek, Coptic, and Cyrillic characters, it is an indication that

does not use emulated italic effects if it uses a substitute font for italic effect but cannot find the correct glyph in the italic font. Similarly, most of the

tables used in the font (except kern) only work if substitute glyphs are available inside the font. * Characters for triple and quadruple dash box-drawing characters all have six dashes. Furthermore, all horizontal dash box-drawing characters have three dashes when using

's half-width features.

Awards

Tokyo Type Directors club awarded 2007 Type design prize to Eiichi Kōno, C&G Inc (Satoru Akamoto, Takeharu Suzuki, Yukiko Ueda), and

for the Meiryo font.

References

ClearType page at Microsoft Design
* メイリオ on the Japanese Wikipedia
Channel9 interview with Cleartype TeamDesign Meets Technology

External links

Microsoft TypographySample at Microsoft Japan PressPass (information for journalists)It's Not Just FontsJapanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP
{{Microsoft Windows Typefaces Sans-serif typefaces Windows Vista typefaces CJK typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2008