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Hirakakupro W6 WORK is a Japanese font that belongs to the Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro family[^1^] [^2^



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.


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.




Font Hirakakupro W6 WORK



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.


Here's an answer in 2021 after my research and from my experience living and working in Japan. I like this article, though it is in Japanese so I'll do my best to summarize. Here are what some major companies are using in Japan:


Something I learned working here: some Japanese prefer Gothic or other fonts over Mincho fonts, as Mincho looks more "Chinese" according to some. None of the companies above use Mincho as evidence to that. Like it or not, I guess that's something to keep in mind when branding.


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:


The "gothic" typeface fonts seem fairly popular these days: on Windows, fonts like MS Gothic, MS PGothic, etc. Ming typeface is also widely used. These are the default browser font settings for Firefox on my Japanese Windows machine:


BTW, the "Osaka" 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).


This is an old thread but for anyone doing research on this now, you should note that Meiryo is no longer a standard font loaded with Windows. Since Windows 10, the new default font is Yu Gothic. You can still install Meiryo manually however. Please see this article


'Noto Sans CJK JP' is also available for Ubuntu linux. It is provided as an official package "fonts-noto-cjk". Still manual installation is required, it is expected to have it installed on Japanese Ubuntu machines.


Hi, I'm new to ArchLinux and I'm trying to configure a LaTeX environment to make documents in Japanese but I'm having some troubles to get my documents in postscript.I didn't have any problems with the compiler pLaTeX so I did manage to compile my tex files in dvi, but I am having problems with reading my dvi files with xdvi and transforming my files from dvi to ps with dvips. In both cases it seems that the fonts are not properly configured and I get this error :


kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode ljfour --bdpi 600 --mag 1+8/600 --dpi 608 rmlmktexpk: don't know how to create bitmap font for rml.mktexpk: perhaps rml is missing from the map file.kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log.dvips: Font rml not found; using cmr10dvips: ! invalid char 9542 from font rml


kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode / --bdpi 600 --mag 1+8/600 --dpi 608 rmlmktexpk: don't know how to create bitmap font for rml.mktexpk: perhaps rml is missing from the map file.kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log.xdvi-xaw: Warning: Character 9542 not defined in font cmr10xdvi-xaw: Warning: Character 9544 not defined in font cmr10


I did look up for that and tried some solutions which seemed to have worked for other persons, such as adding a kanji.map file to map rml and adding this file with updmap --edit or updmap-sys --edit, but no way to get this to work properly.I have the following fonts installed :


$ pacman -Qs ttflocal/ttf-dejavu 2.33-1 Font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts with a wider range of characterslocal/ttf-ipa-mona 1.0.8-1 extended Japanese mona fontlocal/ttf-kochi-substitute 20030809-4 High quality Japanese TrueType fontslocal/ttf-monapo 20090423-4 A Japanese font for viewing Japanese ascii arts properlylocal/ttf-sazanami 20040629-7 Japanese fontslocal/ttf-vlgothic 20120130-1 Japanese TrueType fonts from Vine Linux


which I guess should be enough so I think it's only a problem of mapping, but I can't find any solution.By the way, I did manage to make dvipdfmx work by adding the following lines to /etc/texmf/dvipdfmx/dvipdfmx.cfg


Basically, TeX is failing to find the font which you've asked for (rml). When it fails to find it ready-made, it assumes it might be in metafont format and looks for rules for creating a usable form. Those don't exist so, as a last resort, it falls back to a default font (Computer Modern Roman). But cmr won't work for Japanese because the characters just aren't there.


When I say you are looking at the wrong thing, you are looking at what fonts your *system* has installed. But TeX can't use system fonts - certainly not if you need the tex -> dvi -> ps route. It also cannot use truetype fonts this way. (Unless pLaTeX somehow enables all this.) So the question is, what fonts do you have installed for TeX to use?


Given what is working, it seems as if you might have the tex font metric files for the font installed correctly but that either the type 1 (or other) fonts aren't set up correctly or they aren't installed at all. The reason the dvipdfmx mode works is, I think, because you are not embedding fonts in the pdf. That means it is up to the system/viewer to supply the actual shapes of the characters. And apparently your set up is able to do this. (Either rml is installed and it recognises this or it is substituting an acceptable default.) However, the pdf file you produce in this way is not safe to send to another machine unless you know that machine also has suitable fonts available. So don't, for example, email somebody a job application with this set up because the pdf will not necessarily display correctly on their machine!


OK. So, I don't know anything about typesetting Japanese but:- do you need the tex -> dvi -> ps route? Or would tex -> pdf with pdfLaTeX or something like XeLaTeX be a possibility? If XeLaTeX, say, is an option, you can avoid the entire mess which is TeX font set up and use system fonts directly, including truetype, opentype... whatever. If pdfLaTeX is an option, you need to deal with TeX font set up but you have a bit more flexibility e.g. support for truetype.- what is rml?- can you provide a minimal .tex file demonstrating the problem?- how did you install your TeX system? If you used Arch packages, which packages do you have installed, especially font packages?


Hi and thank you very much for your answer.Actually I've always been using TeX as a complete end user so I never really think of what was really going on when compiling and so on.By reading your answer I did understand what was really the problem but though I tried a little harder to fix that I still wasn't able to get it to work.However I think that this time dvipdfmx should be working properly (with embarked fonts).For Japanese, I have the following fonts :


$ ls /usr/share/fonts/japanese-otf/HiraKakuProN-W3.otf HiraKakuStdN-W8.otf HiraMinProN-W3.otfHiraKakuProN-W6.otf HiraKakuStd-W8.otf HiraMinProN-W6.otfHiraKakuPro-W3.otf HiraMaruProN-W4.otf HiraMinPro-W3.otfHiraKakuPro-W6.otf HiraMaruPro-W4.otf HiraMinPro-W6.otf


To answer your questions, I would not mind using something else than dvi -> ps -> pdf, but is it possible to get the TikZ package (which seems to rely on pstricks) to work with pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX ?As far as I could look up for, rml is the name of a TFM file for Japanese fonts and by extension the name of this font.For a minimal file, anything with Japanese will do, right now I'm just trying to compile :


I installed TeX with pacman, by installing the group texlive-most (which contains texlive-fontsextra), and the packages texlive-langcjk and texlive-langextra. Finally, I installed the fonts showned above in /usr/share/fonts/japanese-otf manually.


The changes I tried to make were all global changes, but as it just didn't seem to work I restored the original configuration, so the only difference there should be between my installation and the basic one should be what I appended in dvipdfmx.cfg, and the fonts that I manually installed.


As far as I could look up for, rml is the name of a TFM file for Japanese fonts and by extension the name of this font.For a minimal file, anything with Japanese will do, right now I'm just trying to compile :


If I compile this with platex, I get an empty dvi. If I convert to ps with dvips, I get something which is obviously not Japanese and if I convert that to pdf, I get something which is obviously not Japanese. I'm not getting the errors you're seeing but I'm also not getting a dvi which looks anything like OK. But this is presumably because I don't have Japanese fonts installed for my system generally.


I also tried compiling sample.tex from the documentation directory for platex. I don't get errors but I get a blank dvi and non-Japanese output in the final ps/pdf. The pre-compiled sample.pdf which comes with the package looks fine. But that was compiled with dvipdfmx. I assume that you would expect this to work i.e. that it works on other TeX setups you've used? Just with platex -> dvips -> ps2pdf ? 2ff7e9595c


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