- From: Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 02:46:35 -0500
- To: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, Ambrose LI <ambrose.li@gmail.com>
- CC: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>, MasaFuji <masa@fuji.email.ne.jp>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>, Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
> > I am not so sure that the original question was even talking about > > artificially condensing and expanding fonts. But supposing that it > > was, maybe we should at least be aware that real condensed and > > expanded fonts generally do not even exist in the CJK world, and the > > only way we can achieve any variation in width at all is artificially. > > This is not entirely correct. While families that include a mixture of widths generally don't > exist, newspapers in Japan often use a slightly expanded (i.e. non-square em-box) face > such as the one below: > > Mainichi Mincho (Morisawa): > http://www.morisawa.co.jp/font/fontlist/details/fontfamily038.html?s=87 The note section of the page mentions that: * This font is designed to be 1em square box. If you want to use this font in the same visual as newspapers, please use the font by scaling 80% vertically. You might see most visual magazines in Japan use condensed fonts, but even in such professional design materials, the situation is the same as above; designers usually use fonts by scaling 80% to 90% to make condensed visuals. That says, the situation is a little different from the one in English typography. Artificially condensed glyphs tend to be considered professional enough in most cases or sometimes even better than the original (at least from layout designer perspective, I know all font designers hate this though). Regards, Koji
Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2011 07:47:15 UTC