I started working at a Japanese company recently. I noticed that many communications/documents from Japanese ex-pats are in the MS PGothic font.
Just curious, does anyone know why this is? Looking on the Microsoft font documentation it says that it is a font capable of supporting Japanese characters, but I would imagine that there are many other hundreds of fonts capable of doing this, so I am wondering why MS Gothic has such a high share of use.
2 comments
It’s the default fallback font, even when the system is not configured for Japanese (or other languages that use CJK fonts).
The biggest reason would be that MS Gothic and MS Mincho are set as default fonts on Windows in Japan. We Japanese don’t like change. Most of the formal documents have been written with MS Gothic and MS Mincho, which don’t make them look cool. This is a kind of tradition in Japan. They are just acting on a precedent, which I think lamentable.