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Some of the Japanese fonts that are used in the original releases of manga were released into the public domain last week. You'd think I could just pop it the lettering and go, right?
Not so fast.
Not so fast.
One thing to know about some Japanese fonts is that the Latin characters are not kerned. Meaning, the spacing between characters isn't adjusted in context. Take for example "BAKLAVA". "B" and "A" have the same space between them as "A" and "V". This makes the type look unbalanced
Kerning might seem finicky, but, when you're squeezing type into manga balloons, every millimeter counts.
The one character I had to make from scratch was the crossbar-I. This is a character we use in comics for the personal pronoun "I" to facilitate reader comprehension on lower-quality paper at small sizes. This is required by all of the publishers I work with.
Most fonts have a special character for an ellipsis (…), and JP fonts have them aligned to the center of the text. I moved it down to the baseline like you'd expect in Latin languages.
If you'd like to check out my "remixed" version of Reggae One, you can find it here: https://github.com/saraoswald/Reggae
I also made a font inspired by Reggae before it was open-sourced, and you can find that here: http://gum.co/spicynoods
I also made a font inspired by Reggae before it was open-sourced, and you can find that here: http://gum.co/spicynoods
To close this out I'd like to give a huge thank you to Fontworks for making this font open-source. You can find all of the source files for Reggae and others here: https://github.com/fontworks-fonts
