What we have done is we have licensed the most beautiful Japanese fonts around and we are bundling them in every copy of MacOS X. If you want want to get over 8,400 characters and if you want to get very beautiful fonts you have to pay a fortune to go license these fonts on a per computer basis. Steve:Īs you may know, there have never been good Japanese fonts shipped in a personal computer operating system. The official unveiling of bundled Hiragino (also used as the OS X Japanese system font, still in use today) was the February 2001 MacWorld Tokyo keynote just one month before OS X shipped. Apple said these new ‘X’ fonts will use the new Adobe Japan 1-4 and JIS encoding standards unveiled at the last Tokyo Seybold Seminars 1999. And it is exciting that Apple is addressing some basic problems of Japanese publishing. It played well in yesterday’s keynote and the demonstrations today. Steve Jobs made a very big deal about kanji fonts and making MacOS X “the best kanji operating system” by licensing 6 ‘Hiragino’ font designs from DaiNippon Screen. Now, with premium quality fonts and the largest character sets ever, Mac OS X will make high-quality publishing a reality in Japan for all customers-professionals and first-time users alike.” At the time I wrote a report for MacInTouch: In his first official appearance in Japan after returning to Apple, Steve Jobs turned the publishing industry on its head when he announced at MacWorld Tokyo 2000 that Apple would bundle professional Japanese fonts licensed from Dainippon Screen with extended character sets: “Capturing the beauty and richness of the Japanese language and kanji characters has always been beyond the capabilities of personal computers.

The transition to macOS X was a very interesting time for the Japanese publishing industry.

Hiragino sans gb