Can be used on both CentOS and Windows! Japanese font (Gothic edition)

Hello.
I'm Mandai, in charge of Wild on the development team.

How do you type Japanese on Linux?
Many people may not think much of it because they use it for work, but changing just one font can change your mood, and above all, it can also change the readability of text, so use a font that is easy to read. I want to feel good writing code and typing commands.

This time, we will introduce some high-quality Japanese fonts that can be obtained for free that will help meet these needs.

Japanese fonts that can be installed with yum

Isn't yum a software installer? You may think so, but we handle a surprisingly wide range of products, including these types of items.
It's easy, so let's install it quickly.

 

IPA font

IPA font download

Speaking of Japanese fonts for Linux, this is probably it.
High quality considering it's free.
It is distributed by the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), an independent administrative agency, so you can use it with confidence.

As long as you don't use the name IPA font, you can modify and redistribute it, so there are many fonts that are derived from IPA fonts.

For CentOS, installation can be done using yum.

sudo yum install ipa-gothic-fonts ipa-pgothic-fonts

This is the beginner's version.

 

VL Gothic font

VL Gothic Font Family

It's a little less major, and it's VL Gothic.

If you want to install VL Gothic on CentOS, you can install it with the following command.

sudo yum install vlgothic-fonts vlgothic-p-fonts

In my case, I like to use VL Gothic when writing source code, and both my code and terminal are set to VL Gothic.

When you hear VL Gothic, you may think, "What the heck?", but if you trace the origin, it was created based on the M+ font, the missing parts were made based on the parts of the M+ font, and even then, the missing parts were created using the ripple font. It is a font that seems to have taken advantage of the best parts, as it has been supplemented with the base characters.

It's my personal preference, but I don't really like monoscope's alphabets, and IPA fonts are unsuitable for terminal use, so I use VL Gothic.

By the way, the M+ font itself is still being added, and it will be updated when about 100 characters have been accumulated.

 

Other usable Japanese fonts

The fonts up to this point can be easily installed using yum, and the ones below require some operations in the terminal.

 

ripple font

efont project Japanese top page - OSDN

Select and download
the latest version of Ripple Font from the download file list Even though it's the latest version, it was last updated in 2004, so it's a little over 12 years old.
The origin of this font is quite interesting, and it was developed as an alternative font when the Dongfeng font (oh nostalgic...) was discontinued.

The reason why distribution ended is detailed in the announcement regarding the end of Dongfeng font production activities

To install, unzip "sazanami-20040629.tar.bz2" downloaded from the URL above, create an appropriate directory under /usr/share/fonts/, and insert it.

wget https://ja.osdn.net/dl/efont/sazanami-20040629.tar.bz2 tar jxf sazanami-20040629.tar.bz2 sudo mv sazanami-20040629 /usr/share/fonts/sazanami

The font installation is now complete.

By the way, Dongfeng is pronounced ``kochi''.
If you read "Tonpuu", you are playing mahjong too much, so please study it.

 

Noto Sans CJK JP

Google Noto Fonts

*Three levels of thickness from top: thin, regular, black

This level is open source! Here are some high-quality fonts that will make you want to groan.
As expected, there are only fonts created by Google and Adobe working together.
However, the capacity...

When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as “tofu”.

This sentence is sure to capture the hearts of Japanese-speaking users.
By the way, "Noto" means "no more tofu," and it seems to be a strong message that the square thing should no longer be displayed.

"Noto Sans Mono CJK JP" is a little thicker, so if you don't like it, you can adjust the thickness to suit your preference with "Noto Sans CJK JP".

The installation method is as follows.

wget https://noto-website-2.storage.googleapis.com/pkgs/NotoSansCJKjp-hinted.zip unzip NotoSansCJKjp-hinted.zip sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/NotoSansCJKjp sudo mv NotoSans* /usr/share/fonts /NotoSansCJKjp/

The extension of the font file in the zip is "otf", but it seems that it can be used as ttf.

As I mentioned earlier, this font was jointly developed by Google and Adobe. Therefore, releases are also carried out separately, and there is a version of Noto Sans released by Google, and a version released by Adobe called Gen no Kaku Gothic.
Although there are some differences, it seems safe to assume that they are generally the same.
Source Han Sans Gothic is said to refer to the Japanese part of the font family "Source Han Sans," which includes Source Han Sans, but it's hard to understand.
Why would you do something like this?

If you search for derivative fonts based on this font, you will find many derivative fonts, but given the high level of perfection of the base font, I get the impression that many of them are quite playful.

 

Takao font

Takao Fonts in Launchpad

Some Linux distributions use this Takao font as the default Japanese font.
That's no wonder, Takao font is a derivative of IPA font.
Takao fonts were created to maintain IPA fonts, which have a gentle release cycle, in a flexible manner.
By the way, the name Takao was given to him by Takao Hayashi, the designer of TB font, which is the basis of IPA font.
To add another layer of insight, the TB font itself is a paid font and can be purchased from the TypeBank font family TB Gothic

The installation method is as follows.

#URL is wget https://launchpad.net/takao-fonts/trunk/15.03/+download/TakaoFonts_00303.01.zip unzip TakaoFonts_00303.01.zip sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/TakaoFonts sudo mv TakaoFonts_00303.01/ Takao* /usr/share/fonts/TakaoFonts/

I ended up having more knowledge than fonts.

That's it.