| Meiryo | |
| Creator: | C&G Inc., Eiichi Kōno, Takeharu Suzuki (Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji), Matthew Carter, Tom Rickner (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic) |
| Foundry: | Microsoft Typography |
| Trademark: | Meiryo is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. |
is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font on Japanese systems beginning with Windows Vista.
Meiryo was created out of a growing need for legible CJK fonts compatible with Microsoft ClearType's hinting and subpixel rendering system. It was meant to increase the legibility of Japanese text on LCD screens, and would thus take the place of MS Gothic and MS Mincho, 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). 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 is a version that uses condensed kana and reduced line height compared to Meiryo, introduced with Windows 7[1] and is also available as an update in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.[2] Similar to MS UI Gothic, the Meiryo UI fonts are bundled with the same Meiryo TTC files of respective weights.
Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of Verdana, 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 and kana also have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100. In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded bitmap 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 hinting language was used for stroke-reduction. A similar technology was used on MingLiU and PMingLiU versions 5.03.
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 conversions between the old and new character forms (kyūjitai and shinjitai) introduced in the JIS78, JIS83, and JIS90 standards.
Meiryo supports the 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.
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 Windows versions since Vista.
For Windows XP, 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 runtime. Downloading and installing the Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows XP from Microsoft also makes Meiryo available on Windows XP.
Meiryo is also distributed with Japanese version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office 2013.
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 as New Johnston. The Latin characters were designed by Matthew Carter, the British-born creator of the Verdana font, and are visibly similar to characters from Verdana. By having a font designed by a combination of Japanese and Latin font experts, Microsoft 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 of Ascender Corporation did extensive programming and font hinting for Meiryo. Rickner helped create the first TrueType fonts at Apple and did all the font hinting for Microsoft’s Georgia and Verdana 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.
The font name comes from the Japanese word meiryō (Japanese: [[wikt:明瞭|明瞭]]) pronounced as /ja/, which means "clarity", referring to ClearType making text written in Meiryo appear clearer on the screen. The Japanese spelling Japanese: メイリオ is taken from the English pronunciation ; the actual Japanese spelling in katakana is Japanese: 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 (Japanese: ＭＳ Ｐゴシック) and MS P Minchō (Japanese: ＭＳ Ｐ明朝).
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]