> When working with western scripts it is common to use bold and italic > to make things stand out. Now I can imagine that italic/oblique of > asian characters may not make sense - but how do users of such scripts > make the "standout" distinction - colour?
Italic and bold 'fonts' exist for Japanese as well. I hesitate to call them fonts because usually they are not made by design but in a algorithmic way, aka they wont look very nice. Probably "bold" and "italic" in Japanese exists, because they exist in western fonts (compatibility). While bold and italics exist, its far away from fine typography to use them. (Their are exceptions, but we are not a typographers list) The normal way is to use a MINCHO font (e.g the standard heisei-mincho; read it as "Times" for western scripts) for normal text and a more rounded GOTHIC fonts for "italics". (Another typographical solution is using katakana instead of hiragana). Another very common way is to underdot (= underline not with a line but with filled or unfilled circles; or just dots like our dots.) BTW, just to make things a little more complicated, 'underdots', punctuation and some other characters will change their shape (= code-point) if printed vertically. So if you change view from horizontal to vertical some character conversion is necessary. > Be that as it may - to present western text in the normal manner it would > be useful to be able to rely on there being a bold (screen) and to a lesser > extent an italic (print) version of a particular font. I don't see any problems to use bolded Japanese in man-pages and to some extend in technical documentation etc. Andreas Marcel
