I just noticed something funny while reviewing the character 辻. The road primitive suddenly had two dots instead of one. I thought that was really strange as I had reviewed that character before and I was sure I was correct in drawing it with only one. I checked in the RtK book and saw only one dot there.

So why was the website suddenly inventing an extra dot? I realized that since my last revision of that character I had installed the メイリオ font. (A new Microsoft font that allows Cleartype anti-aliasing of the Japanese characters). That was it!

I looked up the character in wikipedia and if I'm understanding correctly they are saying that this character should indeed have two dots but that it may not be displayed that way due to "circumstances". (see the little box on the right).

Anyway I hope I didn't bore you to death with that story. ^^" I was really surprised. Has anybody else using the メイリオ font noticed that too?

The "official" standard (JIS2004) for that character has changed, and so any new fonts such as the one you installed should reflect that. There is a thread with some of the other changes on here if you do a search.

Thanks for this info!

I'm sure they are changing those characters to make it harder for us to learn the kanji. With the Heisig method and this website, it was becoming too easy.

[ファブリス]

Hi Codexus do you have some more details about that font? I've love to get a look at it.

Sure, first there is a wikipedia entry that gives the general background information.

The font is supposed to ship with the Japanese version of Vista but I found a Japanese web page with instructions and downloads to get it to work on XP and OSX. I didn't follow all their instructions though, just copied the file to my fonts folder and changed the default font for windows and firefox.

I hope it's legit copyright-wise, maybe it's not even the exact same one that ships with Vista but a free equivalent or something, I don't really know. Feel free to remove the link if you think that could be a problem (it's on the first page if you google it anyway).

Funny, I was adjusting settings on my memo in sidebar in Japanese vista and this メイリオ font showed as the default which I'd never heard of. Thanks for the heads up!

[ファブリス]

Thanks Codexus! I have a hard time getting used to ClearType though :/

Not all monitors give the same level of satisfaction with ClearType. Do you have a DVI connection? The results are usually poor with VGA cables.

Pixel size is also an important factor. The smaller the better. I had a 1920x1200 laptop at my previous work and that was the best screen for ClearType. Monitors that are physically large but with poor resolution are the worst.

Also in some rare cases it's necessary to use the ClearType Tuner utility to reverse the RGB subpixels order.

But even if you're getting good results, It can take a few days to get used to it. My mp3 player is still using a font that doesn't ClearType the Japanese characters and now I find them awfully pixelated in comparison.

Also, cleartype doesn't work at all on CRT monitors.