Don’t forget to set the font family for each design element.īecause the Japanese language does not have spaces, the space between text is always the same and needs no hyphenation. Tip: Proportional pitch fonts are better suited to mobile or UI elements, and fixed pitch fonts are better suited for header or body copy. On the other hand, fonts in which different characters have same widths are called “fixed pitch” or “monospace” fonts. The Japanese language does not have extremely thin characters like upper case “I” or lower case “l”. Alignment and Fixed Pitchįonts in which different characters have different widths (pitches) are called “proportional pitch” fonts. Of course, these vary depending on font family. Tip: To avoid low legibility, I recommend a minimum of 12 px font size, 150% line height, and 0.05 em letter spacing for body paragraphs. Due to height and complexity, Japanese web localization often requires slightly bigger font sizes, wider letter spacing, and line height. All characters are roughly the same size as English capital letters, and many characters end up bigger than alphanumeric characters even when the font size remains the same. The Japanese language uses none of these variables. It also has upper case letters and lower case letters. Typography in English has parameters called cap-height, x-height, baseline and descender height. For example, the alphabet character “A” only needs 7 x 7 pixels, but the kanji character “艦” requires 15 x 15 pixels for it to be readable.

Japanese kanji characters use more pixels than alphanumeric characters because they consist of many strokes. Anatomy of Japanese Web Typography It’s Complicated

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