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A Master of Images A Master of Quality A Master of Technology Development A Master of Environmentalism
Note: Departmental affiliations and job titles were accurate as of this publication.
In this digital age, the chances of reading text on an LCD screen have increased dramatically.
E-books, to say nothing of the Internet and mobile phones, are becoming familiar.
Something similar is also happening in the world of television.
Digital broadcasting has begun, and the importance of the legibility and beauty of text displayed on TV sets such as electronic programming guides (EPG) and data broadcasting cannot be underestimated.
When Sharp's Kameyama Plant No. 2 became operational, an issue that surfaced at the end of the development of the AQUOS R Series, which became the flagship model of the AQUOS, was the problem of "text."
Sharp now had a full-HD TV that demanded text befitting its superb image quality--text as beautiful as its video images.
The task was handed to Akio Kotani, Ph.D., Senior Technical Research Fellow, Platform Technology Development Center, Corporate Research and Development Group.
The LC Font actually has a long history.
In 1991, Dr. Kotani received a request from his superiors to develop a font for the print function of stand-alone word processors, one of Sharp's core businesses at the time.
There was no precedent for a consumer electronics maker to create an original font.
Dr. Kotani first put out feelers to type foundries and phototypesetting companies, asking them to allow Sharp to use their fonts.
It's hard to imagine now, but back then, the only characters electronic devices could print looked crude and unattractive.
But the companies that had the fonts Dr. Kotani wanted to use turned him down. They did not want their fonts used in word processors, and it would be of no advantage for them have the design of the characters altered.
Dr. Kotani had no choice but to build a font himself.
In Japan, text has traditionally been written vertically, from top to bottom. Traditional type was designed based on the assumption that the text would appear in vertical columns on the page, and consequently, variations in the height of the individual characters were unimportant.
But printing using word processors is primarily done horizontally in lines across the page. When traditional type was used for horizontal printing, it turned out that the variations in the vertical height of the characters were significant and distracting.
The new font was to be used for writing horizontally, and the next step was a design for the LCD screen.
The Japanese use kanji, glyphs derived from traditional Chinese characters. Dr. Kotani formulated new rules for the characters used for LCDs, such as the balance of the characters, and the thickness and angles of the lines that make them up.
The Japan Industrial Standard (JIS) includes approximately 8,000 kanji in the JIS Level 1 and 2 character sets. By the time Dr. Kotani and his team created all these characters, five years had flown by.
Even so, this new font was not immediately adopted for use in word processors.
Word processors at that time used a font style called Ming (serif). The font that Dr. Kotani developed was a Gothic type (sans serif).
"People were saying that the balance between the left-hand side and the right-hand sides of the newly revised kanji characters was not well adapted to word processors. I thought about giving up on development at that point."
Later, though, his font design was adopted for use in Sharp Visual Information Radio receivers and in Mebius notebook PCs.
For the LC Font to finally enter the spotlight had to wait until text information began flooding the LCD screens of mobile phones from services such as "i-mode" from NTT DoCoMo.
LC Fonts possess a technology that makes it possible to display text beautifully,
even on the small LCD screens of mobile phones, without blurring or distorting
the characters.
To begin with, LCDs use a matrix of dots (pixels) to display text characters.
For instance, for 16-dot characters, a single character is formed by marking out a 16 V x 16 H grid (256 dots in total).
For the LC Font, 12-dot characters had also already been developed.
Some kanji are extremely complex and are made up of many lines. With only a 12-dot x 12-dot grid, it may be physically impossible to display these characters accurately.
According to Dr. Kotani, the biggest feature of any kanji character is its silhouette, and it can be read correctly as long as its external shape remains intact, even if interior lines are omitted.
Dr. Kotani calls this the "DNA" of a character.
Abbreviated characters can be read as long as these "genes" that the character has had since ancient times are preserved.
"Instantly identifiable"--this was the most important factor for the characters used for LCDs.
However, Dr. Kotani had to completely revamp his thinking for LCD TVs.
The first thing he was told at the development lab for TVs is "Look at the text from a distance of 2.5 meters."
There is a difference between "characters to be read" and "characters to be seen."
Mobile phones demand "legibility" so that characters can be read accurately, but LCD TVs demand "accurate and beautiful" characters.
From character design to software and even to hardware architecture, Dr. Kotani had to re-build everything from scratch.
He had to render characters by not only omitting some of the lines that make them up, but also by adjusting the weight of the lines.
Whenever the size of the character changes, the aesthetic balance of the character also changes.
Dr. Kotani also adopted scalable font technology that automatically retains an aesthetic balance even when the size changes. In the end, though, human eyes must still check the appearance of a character.
The character set used in the AQUOS includes some 9,000 characters contained in JIS Level 1 and 2 kanji plus special characters used in broadcasting.
There are three font styles and ten sizes.
In other words, Dr. Kotani's development team checked about 270,000 characters--one character at a time.
“Font technology must change according to the product (media) being used. We understood this well. The AQUOS R Series incorporates all the know-how we have cultivated up to now.”
In the EPG that everyone is now familiar with, the characters can be rendered with the beauty and easy legibility that one would expect from the LC Font, and it plays a role in the aesthetics of the LCD TV itself.
“Each individual font has its own development background. Traditional typesetting has a certain aesthetic quality. There was no way to avoid sacrificing some of this quality in the process of digitalization.”
He speaks of using technology to faithfully reproduce this quality as a challenge for the future.
The year before last, Dr. Kotani presented a technical paper on the center of gravity of characters.
The center of gravity is not simply the center of the grid or matrix, but is the psychologically perceived center of the character.
Aligning the centers of gravity makes it possible to arrange the characters so that they look aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Dr. Kotani earned his doctorate based on this thesis.
Are there characters that are difficult to make even for the Master of Fonts?
“In terms of design, kanji characters with multiple strokes are actually simple. The kanji that have only a few strokes are the ones that are more difficult.”
The kanji for the “
” in Dr. Kotani's name has only three strokes. This one was particularly difficult.
A Master of Images A Master of Quality A Master of Technology Development A Master of Environmentalism
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