During my earlier assignments for my Website Localization class, I ran into some frustrations when trying to implement webfonts. My language is Japanese. It’s not an uncommon one by any means, but there’s extremely few options nonetheless! Even Google doesn’t have any Japanese web fonts (it does have some in beta, however, and I’m looking forward to those being fully launched).
The problem of CJK Fonts
So why is it that there’s so few options? Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, has thousands of characters. Japanese people learn some 2,000+ in school, but there are another thousand or so necessary for proper names – and if you include all the rare characters, you end up with more than 50,000! That means that if you are using a font other than the pre-installed ones, you are forcing your readers’ browsers to download thousands of files, which makes the page slow to load and increases the bandwidth usage enormously. What’s more, that’s just for Japanese – Chinese is even worse, in terms of the number of characters needed.
