Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Fontopia

By an odd coincidence, on the same day that the new 12-inch and 17-inch PowerBook models were announced I received from the Dynalab Type Museum, a CD-ROM containing 100 Japanese TrueType fonts for Windows, fonts that I’d assumed would be the final nail in the coffin of my waning—though perhaps soon to be resurrected—Macintosh career.

I’ve held on to my old PowerPC 8500 in order to use a brush-style Japanese font that I found on a Macintosh WordPerfect installation CD. Windows 2000 only ships with full and half-width versions of the two Japanese fonts shown in the following illustration: MS Mincho (upper) and MS Gothic (lower). As you can see, they’re roughly equivalent to Times New Roman and Arial—and equally uninspiring.

Which is not to say that Japanese language support under Windows 2000 isn’t adequate. It’s actually fine, roughly equivalent to the Macintosh Japanese Language Kit that I was using in 1992.

But it seemed crazy to keep a whole computer just to use a nice Japanese font once in a while. My friend Gerrit Fokkema has an 8500 he’s about to donate to a local school and it would be nice to give them two instead of one. So I ordered the font CD and, when I checked later, I realized that the UPS truck had pulled up at precisely the time that Steve Jobs was introducing the new PowerBooks.

The Windows fonts turned out to be pretty good, as this small sample may suggest:

I can’t write about fonts with any authority—Dean Allen is in charge of that department. (Dean’s Twenty Faces is a fascinating introduction to the joys of type.) And, just like those used in English or any other language, Japanese fonts can be incredibly expressive too. I’m looking forward to having fun with Japanese type on my PC (though I understand that Mac OS X ships with some cool Japanese typefaces).

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