Kochi font

Kochi font (東風フォント) was a font development project to build free replacements of proprietary fonts such as MS Gothic or MS Mincho, developed by Yasuyuki Furukawa (古川 泰之). The project consisted of Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts.

The project started out as a raster font known as Watanabe (渡邊).

The development was stopped when it was discovered that Kochi contains glyphs copied from TypeBank Mincho-M.

Kochi-Substitute

Kochi-Substitute is developed to replace Kochi, without infringing on commercially available fonts. The fonts in Kochi-substitute family uses the old Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho font names, but the file names are changed to kochi-gothic-subst.ttf and kochi-mincho-subst.ttf respectively.

Kochi-Substiture is currently part of the efont project, maintained by KANOU Hiroki.

The outlines of kana and Latin glyphs came from the old Kochi font project for kana and Latin-based characters. Greek and Cyrillic glyphs were built specifically for Kochi-Substitute by Uchida (内田). Other outline glyphs came from Wadalab font (和田研フォントja icon).

Kochi Gothic uses outlines from the old Kochi Gothic for kana and Latin-based characters, Greek and Cyrillic characters created by Uchida. Kochi Mincho uses Wadalab Mincho (和田研明朝) outline for other characters; Kochi Gothic uses Wadalab Gothic for JIS X 0208 characters, Wadalab Maru for JIS X 0212 characters.

Kochi Gothic uses embedded bitmaps from following:

Naga 10 for 10-pixel font, Shinonome12 for 12-pixel font, k14goth for 14-pixel font, Shinonome 16 for 16-pixel font, Ayu 20dot Font (東風) for 20-pixel font.

Kochi Mincho uses embedded bitmaps from following:

Naga 10 for 10-pixel font, Shinonome12 for 12-pixel font, Tachibana font (橘フォント, k14) for 14-pixel font, Shinonome 16 for 16-pixel font, Kappa 20dot Font for 20-pixel font.

Each font contains 15365 glyhs (14755 characters). Despite the claim, many characters are not visible, including most Latin-1 Supplement characters.

Both fonts also support following code pages: 1252 (Latin 1), 1250 (Latin 2), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1254 (Turkish), 1257 (Windows Baltic), 932 (JIS/Japan), Reserved for OEM, 865 (MS-DOS Nordic), 863 (MS-DOS Canadian French), 861 (MS-DOS Icelandic), 857 (MS-DOS IBM Turkish), 852 (Latin 2), 775 (MS-DOS Baltic), 850 (WE/Latin 1), 437 (US).

OpenType layout tables support Vertical Writing for Kana under Default and Japanese languages.

External links

* [http://khdd.net/kanou/fonts/stolenbitmap.en.20030627.html About unauthorized copy of 32-dot bitmap font]
* [http://wiki.fdiary.net/font/?freefont efont homepage]
* [http://slashdot.jp/articles/03/06/18/1054209.shtml Slashdot Japan article]