I am working on a japanese website and have a hard time finding a font which looks good in japanese. I was surprised that so few fonts seem to exist for japanese.
My team has contacted several web font providers without much success. Only one company could offer a web font for japanese but it was 35 megabytes which is far to big for the clients to download to their browsers. For Latin letters there are a few fonts which one can be quite confident almost all users have, like Arial, Verdana, TNR, Georgia and so on.
What fonts equal these in japan? Web-font for Japanese, though there are few providers exist, is not really practical as you found the size of the font data is too big to download. Usually Japanese font has 8,000-16,000 glyph so making new fonts means you need to make at least 8,000 glyph, which is pretty heavy task. As a result of it, there are very few variations in Japanese fonts, and Japanese users also care about fonts less than Latin-character users. Most Japanese websites use default font sets provided on Windows or Mac. The latest ones are Meiryo and Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro.
For older versions such like Windows XP, it is good to add former default fonts MS Gothic(or MS Mincho)/Osaka. Some old browsers could not understand those font names in English, some others do not recognize the names in Japanese, so it is safe to write both in Japanese and English. Meiryo and Hiragino's order is, because Mac users may have Meiryo from MS-Office, and Hiragino is more familiar and matching well on Mac, better by starting Hiragino series. So the current recommended practice is like this, font-family:'ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3', 'Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro',Osaka, 'メイリオ', Meiryo, 'ＭＳ Ｐゴシック', 'MS PGothic', sans-serif. My client wanted MS PGothic and is very satisfied with being able to use a 'standard' font instead of the heavy web font which we tried first. The main problem here is that I wasn't able to test the font, since I wasn't able to 'simulate' an asian environment on my swedish or english windows installations. I installed the japanese language pack from MS Update but that didn't help me.
So, they are satisfied but I still cannot see what it looks like. We settled for the following style: font-family: 'ＭＳ Ｐゴシック', 'MS PGothic', 'メイリオ', Meiryo, sans-serif; – Jan 31 '13 at 9:01. I am no font/design expert, but just about every Japanese PC should have basic Latin fonts like the ones you mentioned installed, so they will work. But those fonts give a kind of Western look to Japanese characters.
If you want to use fonts that Japanese sites typically use I would start by browsing some of the more popular Japanese sites and using things like Firebug or the Chrome developer tools to examine the CSS and see what fonts they reference. For example, yahoo.co.jp currently has this CSS: font-family: 'MS PGothic', Osaka, Arial, sans-serif; The ' typeface fonts seem fairly popular these days: on Windows, fonts like MS Gothic, MS PGothic, etc. Typeface is also widely used.
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These are the default browser font settings for Firefox on my Japanese Windows machine: The proportional font is the sans-serif font, which is MS PGothic, serif font is MS PMing, and the monospace font is MS Gothic. BTW, the ' font was a standard font on Japanese Macs in the 90s.
Unless you want that 'retro' feel, is highly recommended to use 'Hiragino Sans' (not Kaku Gothic that's deprecated) for macOS and iOS devices for a consistent and modern look and better legibility. Also Hiragino Sans has far more font weights (10) than Kaku Gothic (only 2). My client wanted MS PGothic and is very satisfied with being able to use a 'standard' font instead of the heavy web font which we tried first. The main problem here is that I wasn't able to test the font, since I wasn't able to 'simulate' an asian environment on my swedish or english windows installations. I installed the japanese language pack from MS Update but that didn't help me.
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So, they are satisfied but I still cannot see what it looks like. We settled for the following style: font-family: 'ＭＳ Ｐゴシック', 'MS PGothic', 'メイリオ', Meiryo, sans-serif; – Jan 31 '13 at 9:01.