Note: this is part 1 in a planned series covering digital publishing in the Japanese market. For background read about the 2nd Wave. To see screen shots click on the blog title and read the individual post.
MacOS X 10.5 Leopard introduced a new text framework called CoreText to replace the ATSUI and MLTE Carbon text API. Core Text is the third MacOS Text API makeover for which the few loyal MacOS developers who invested first in QuickDraw GX advanced text and layout technology and then ATSUI, have had to program for.
One Japanese software developer Ergosoft dutifully adopted each and every Apple text technology, perhaps the only developer in the world to to do so. I spoke with Ergosoft Marketing Director Isamu Iwata back in 2002, when Ergo used ATSUI for the Japanese advanced layout features in its EGWord Version 12 word processor package, and in 2007 when Ergo released free Leopard updates to EG Word Universal 2, one of the first third-party programs to use Core Text.
EGWord was the first commercial word processor software package to deliver AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) features such as extended Japanese glyph access, glyph variations and Japanese kerning and did so in a clean easy to understand UI. At that time Iwata said speed was the primary benefit of the new API, “Core Text is much faster than ATSUI was. Other developers didn’t use many ATSUI features and I don’t think many developers will invest much in Core Text as it’s an Apple-only solution.”had a point, as Apple does not even bother to use Core Text to implement a basic Japanese text feature such as vertical layout in its own Cocoa-based word processor, Pages 09. Apple even dropped previously marketed Apple Advanced Typography glyph variant features from Hiragino Pro N without any explanation. Major developers such as Adobe, Microsoft and Quark already had their won text engines and did not use Apple’s text frameworks.
Hiragino Pro N fonts dropped Glyph Variations. They still exist in the older Hiragino Pro
The big change came when Core Text was rolled into iOS with the iPad only iOS 3.3 release and in iPhone with iOS 4. For advanced layout, it’s the only framework available. From a Japanese developer point of view CoreText on iOS is somewhat useless because it doesn’t support the vertical text layout features of the desktop version. Core Text also has a reputation of being somewhat buggy and the Core Text documentation on the Apple developer site is weak.
Though Ergo shut down in early 2008, lead programmers Hirose Norihito and Arano Kenta established their own company Monokakido just in time to develop for iOS 2. They have produced some of the biggest selling iOS App titles on the Japan App store: Daijirin and Wisdom English Japanese Dictionary. In early 2010 Hirose san told me "Compared to ATSUI, Core Text feels incomplete." The ugly reality is that without full vertical text layout support in Core Text on iOS Japanese developers have to ‘roll their own’ text layout engine for vertical layout.
Rolling your own text layout engine is fine if you are a developer but Japanese publishers have some difficult choices on iOS and Android:
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