The Innocent Statement

At Netring we are taking on a new project called Engvocab.com, a book and website combination (Just a note - we are not responsible what what is on the engvocab.com domain at the moment). It will be an essential English vocabulary for people learning the English language, and the first target audience will be the Japanese.

Taking on this project means that we have had some homework to do. Strange though it may seem, we haven't had the opportunity to develop many Japanese websites before. I have been doing some research into the standards for dealing with the Japanese language (and indeed other languages for future additions to the project).

During my swatting up, I found this great W3C Draft. It contains lots useful information and food for thought. I recommend that anyone who thinks they would like to create multi-lingual websites read this.

Lost in Translation

I have come across a dead end in my research. In the W3C Draft, there is a section called "Styling using the language attribute". In this section they recommend styling each different language with different a font-family. There are even some examples for various languages (the method of styling is debatable – due to support from IE, but that is another matter). Unfortunately, I am now drawing a blank on what font-families are the best to use for Japanese.

Does anyone know what fonts are best to use for Japanese copy? Which ones have good support on a range of operating systems? And which ones might be the most readable?

Update

After I posted this entry I realised that I need a bigger audience to get my answer (let's face it, my site doesn't really have the biggest readership). For this reason I went to the Web Standards Group list for help. I have had a couple of replies that proved invaluable. I would like to share what they had to say here, and the links they gave me.

Philippe Wittenbergh gave me a link to his studio's portfolio page in Japanese, and a link to the style sheet that he uses to select font-families. He also linked me to a site that has some lists of fonts and screen shots (in Japanese) and an article on Japanese typography.

He also gave this valuable advice:

"Take care of character encoding, and be aware that MS Office uses some non-standard characters that only display fine in that browser (ahem)."

Asela also gave me lots of useful information and links:

As you may already know, Japanese font families are made of Mincho typefaces & Gothic typefaces (Very much like serif and sans-serif ). And Gothics are the best on screen since brushstroke based Mincho fonts shredded and blotted on screen.

Here is a great resource on Japanese typography:

• http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111
• http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?118

And here is a comparison chart Japanese of fonts & sizes on screen

Hope this would help, till IE figure out there problems on web standards. ;)