There is probably nobody on this planet who knows more about Japanese font programming and typography than Tomihisa Uchida. He has been involved with Japanese digital font production from the start, working at its very heart: Shaken KK.
Shaken was the first company to create a phototypesetter for the Japanese market in the 1920’s and gave birth to the typesetter market while creating the finest Japanese font library. Unfortunately Shaken failed to embrace PostScript and Desktop Publishing and the business started to fade in the late 1980’s. Today the company and it’s library are almost extinct.
Uchida: I was with Shaken for 23 years. I entered right out of college, where I was a chemistry major. My first job there was working with analog plates and mechanical processes. That involved high-resolution plates, similar to what is used for IC chip manufacture, to produce high-quality typography. I did that for 10 years; then digital fonts came along in the early ’70s. Shaken was the first Japanese vendor to have computerized layout. It also did the Japanese version of Ikarus. There wasn’t any real competition and it had the market to itself.
Japan Type Bank (JB): So Shaken made the transfer to digitalized fonts and computer-based layout successfully?
Uchida: Yes, it purchased the Japanese rights to Autologic technology to produce a hybrid product where the software was a customized Autologic engine running on Shaken hardware. That didn’t last too long, as Shaken had been developing in-house technology and soon released its own original product.
We simply implemented Japanese typography and composition rules on the computer with outline fonts that output on an imagesetter using proprietary technology. At that time, Shaken systems were extensively used in newspaper production. However, Shaken lost that market because it didn’t have strong network capability, which newspaper production demands.
One of the ways Shaken was able to build up a strong type library in a fairly short time was by sponsoring a type- face competition. It would pay the winner and purchase his typeface. It raised lots of young designers that way [like Suzuki-, who would later create the Hiragino font used in Apple’s MacOS X] and really expanded the market with new typefaces for comic books and such.
Later on, my job was creating different weights. The designer would create the basic design, then we’d use the Ikarus system to make the weights. That was the late ’70s. The systems we designed ran on hardware from the likes of DEC and Wang. I had a group of people who were basically a font production line. When Japanese PostScript first arrived (1989), it wasn’t immediately apparent that things would change as they did. It took forever to print. Shaken systems always had excellent performance.
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Font Tools
Of the many issues that Uchida has involved himself with throughout his career, none has occupied himPrint Workflow
more than trying to solve the Japanese character- creation bottleneck. To this end, he joined Font- works International, one of the first Japanese PostScript font vendors. It invested heavily in the QuickDraw GX type-creation solutions that hit the market just about the time Apple decided to drop GX. (Fontworks International stroke fonts are explained in the 2nd Wave of Japanese DTP)
JB: It’s too bad you didn’t start with Fontworks earlier; you really seemed on the verge of a breakthrough.
Uchida: Yes, we were pretty close. If we had just had some more time.... I was only with them for five years, from just about the time when Apple started having second thoughts about QuickDraw GX. Fontworks asked me if I was interested in working on its stroke-font base- character production tool, ‘2 x 2’, so I joined the effort and worked on the hinting and performance quality. I was always interested in font-production tools. Fontog- rapher really isn’t very good for Japanese font produc- tion. It’s an issue I hope to continue working on in the future.
JB: And now you are with Iwata Corporation.
Uchida: Correct. I work with newspaper fonts and layout. Newspaper font designs are different because the text is always vertical. Fonts need good layout to look their best, so I’m working on them together. OpenType, for example, has fractions, third-width and quarter- width glyphs, but most applications are not OpenType layout-aware, so it’s a real waste. The result is pretty ugly.
Right now, the only OpenType layout engine out there is much, but it seems the next version of Quark XPress J doesn’t have much OpenType support. If that’s true, it means you’ll have to use InDesign to access OpenType advanced typography. I’m not sure if users are really ready to make the change or not. There are still lots of old fonts out there, too. But still, no matter what kind of fancy fonts you have, s far as newspaper production is concerned, I understand that American systems are much more open than Japanese systems, and American papers seem more adept at leveraging their content for different media. Japanese newspapers are still living in the age of proprietary systems—Hitachi
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