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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

An interesting distinction is that all Japanese (and Chinese, and Korean) fonts are monospace. Unlike western writing, all Japanese characters are exactly the same width.

This is the reason for the so-called "full width" characters, to fit western writing into the same character boxes as Japanese characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms

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Korean uses non-monospaced punctuation, spaces and numbers though, it’s not fully-monospaced like Chinese and Japanese

https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA...

Japanese also has monospaced numbers but maybe they’re not super common.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3...

Not all fonts are monospace. For example, on Windows you have MS PGothic and MS PMincho, which are the proportional versions of MS Gothic and MS Mincho.

I came here just to talk about how much Chinese and Korean fonts are not nearly as uniform as Japanese. Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere. In China and Korea, there may be those "On Sale! Only 5 yuan this week!" kind of add-on signs with different colors and fonts/sizes. In Japan, it's just the item name and price, black and white, one size.

As a foreign traveler, Japan makes everything uniform and easy; even if things are different (and they often are) they're very approachable. China and Korea do not have the same approachable-ness for a random Westerner.

> Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere.

Definitely not. I don't know if you live in Japan or not but the stuff I see walking around my neighborhood has plenty of stylized, varied, and even handwritten fonts and signs.

EDIT: Here's an example picture from google maps of a random corner (the first one I found, didn't have to look much): https://upload.i.ng/file/interpolatesdisarrangesocioeconomic...

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