Meiryo

Meiryo (メイリオ, Meirio) is a

Meiryo UI is a version that uses condensed

Characteristics

Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of

Meiryo is developed to comply with JIS X 0213:2004 and can also use the newest set of personal name characters provided by the Japanese Minister of Justice. In addition, it contains OpenType tables for JIS78, JIS83, JIS90 forms for legacy usages.

Meiryo supports following OpenType layout features for Cyrillic, Greek, Han Ideographic, Kana, Latin 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 TrueType 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 has been included with all

Meiryo is also distributed with Japanese version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office 2013.

Authors

The Japanese characters of Meiryo were designed by C&G Inc. and

The font name comes from the Japanese word meiryō (明瞭) [meːɾʲoː], which means "clarity", referring to ClearType making text written in Meiryo appear clearer on the screen. The Japanese spelling メイリオ is taken from the English pronunciation /ˈmeɪri.oʊ/; the actual Japanese spelling in katakana is メイリョウ.

According to Eiichi Kōno, the name was chosen for its exotic-sounding pronunciation and its compactness.^[3]

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 (ＭＳ Ｐゴシック) and MS P Minchō (ＭＳ Ｐ明朝).

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 Windows 7.^[4]
• Sized between 11 and 13 points (96 dpi), glyphs have inconsistent stroke weight without the activation of
  Mac OS X 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
  MS Gothic
  .
• Because of its compliance with Japanese Industrial Standard for encoding
  MS Mincho font families to use characters in JIS X 0208-1990.^[9]
  )
• When italicized, only Latin characters are slanted, not
  Cyrillic characters, it is an indication that Windows Vista 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 OpenType
  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 OpenType'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 Matthew Carter for the Meiryo font.^[11]

See also

• List of CJK fonts

References

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

External links

• Microsoft Typography
• Sample at Microsoft Japan PressPass (information for journalists)
• It's Not Just Fonts
• Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP