People who write blog posts or run websites sometimes come to me saying, "I've written it correctly, but the layout doesn't come out the way I want."

The previous article, "I want to fix italics," is also slightly related to this topic.

Not only WordPress but various blog sites come with at least some functions for decorating text. What you can do differs depending on the blog you use, but some blogs let you make text bold, change the text color, or add underlines.

Even though you've correctly specified the text decoration, the italics don't apply, or the bold doesn't take effect… Sometimes it's a coding mistake or other CSS getting in the way, but sometimes there's a more fundamental problem. And that is…

The font you're using simply doesn't have that feature.

Some of you may have heard of the font "Meiryo." This typeface was even the standard font for Windows, and it's easy to read when typing in Japanese. Because the font places such emphasis on readability, it doesn't include an "italic" style, which would make it harder to read.

When building a website, if you specify "Meiryo" as the font displayed on a page, you end up in a situation where the blog has an "italic" button but the display doesn't change.

The same thing can happen with bold text.

Also, people who write code sometimes specify font weight in their markup. Many fonts support bold, but I've rarely heard of Japanese fonts that support weights specified numerically, such as 400, 500 or 600.

When you look at the many kinds of fonts such as Google web fonts, various weights are available, and when re-editing themes created overseas there are detailed text specifications—it makes me a little envious.

I do think Japanese is a language where preparing a typeface is extremely demanding, with a mix of hiragana, katakana and kanji, but I'd be glad if more such fonts appear in the future.