Kazuraki is now available!
Our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), is now available for sale on our Type Showroom, including those for Japan, France, and Germany. Click here to be taken to the ordering page, which also includes links to its Specimen Book and Glyph Complement PDFs.
Kazuraki was designed by Adobe Systems’ Senior Typeface Designer, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), which began as a typeface called Teika that won the Silver Prize in the Kanji Category at Morisawa’s 2002 International Typeface Competition.
Although Kazuraki is branded as a kana font, and includes a full complement of glyphs for hiragana and katakana, it also includes glyphs for 1,082 kanji, symbols, and punctuation, along with fifty vertical two-, three-, and four-character hiragana ligatures. A defining characteristic of Kazuraki is that is fully-proportional in both writing directions. Some glyphs are wider than they are tall, and vice versa, and this is reflected in the glyph metrics. Below is an example:
For those who wish to read about the production details, Adobe Tech Note #5901 is available, and a Japanese translation is provided.
Below is a Japanese translation:
かづらき®書体の販売が始まる！
ケン・ランディ （言語学博士）
弊社では、画期的な日本語OpenTypeプロポーショナルかなフォント（＋字種限定漢字追加）「かづらき」の販売を、米国だけでなく日仏独各国のType Showroom webサイト上で開始しました。ここをクリックすれば発注ページにアクセス可能で、そこでは見本帳と収録字種のリストがPDFでダウンロードすることができます。
かづらきはアドビのシニア・デザイナー、西塚涼子がデザインした書体で、2002年のモリサワ賞国際タイプフェイスコンテストで「汀花」という書体名で銀賞を受賞したデザインを発展させたものです。
「かなフォント」として、ひらがなとカタカナが含まれるだけでなく、1,082文字の漢字と一部の約物・記号も含んでいます。さらに、50種の縦用の２連・３連・４連のひらがな合字も収録されています。
縦組でも横組でも完全にプロポーショナルである、という点が、かづらきの決定的な特徴です。文字の形は変化に富んでいて、文字ごとに字幅が変化します。次の組み見本をご覧ください。
このフォントの実装方法の詳細について関心のある方は、Adobe Tech Note #5901を参照ください。日本語訳もあります。
6 Responses
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Congratulations!This looks beautiful.
looks like The Matrix lol[I never thought about Kazuraki for such uses, but it is nonetheless ideal for use as a decorative typeface in vertical writing. — KL]
Excellent; that’s gorgeous.[Yes, we think so, too. — KL]
Looking forward to seeing this font rise through the various Adobe-Japan1-x stages![We, too, are looking forward to seeing Kazuraki’s glyph set grow. The next version, which is currently in development, completes the coverage for the 1,006 kanji in the Gakushu Kanji (学習漢字) set, which are the kanji taught during the first six grades in Japan. Note that Kazuraki is based on the special-purpose “Adobe-Identity-0” ROS (/Registry, /Ordering, and /Supplement), which accommodates dynamic glyph sets, or glyph sets that do not match mainstream fonts. As Kazuraki’s coverage of kanji and other Japanese-specific characters continues to grow, it will remain an Adobe-Identity-0 OpenType Japanese font, but its name will necessarily change. When you have a chance, be sure to check out Adobe Tech Note #5901 (the link is in the article above), which describes the techniques used to turn Kazuraki into a fully-functional OpenType font. — KL]
Excellent! Fonts designed for vertical writing are uncomon, so I guess this is a good chance to promote this area.
Is it just me, or does the hiragana shi look too much like the chōon dash?
Indeed. The shapes of hiragana “shi” (し) and the vertical form of the katakana long vowel mark (ー) look similar, but are easily distinguished by context.
Also, consider the following katakana: エカタニハロ. They look remarkably similar to the following ideographs (kanji), but generally look smaller: 工力夕二八口. Yet another is hiragana “he” (へ) versus katakana “he” (ヘ), which can be difficult to distinguish. (Kazuraki includes glyphs for these characters.) These similarities are perhaps more striking than the one you pointed out, and again, are distinguished by context. Katakana rarely occur in isolation, which is one of these contexts.
In any case, we are pleased that you like Kazuraki, because we do. ☺