Sony Corp director Dr Toshitada Doi, who is also chairman of the Desktop Publishing Consortium of over 100 systems and software houses involved in developing the Japanese publishing market, has been bemoaning the drag on his specialisation in Japan of the shortage of outline kanji fonts, a problem that has its root in the enormous effort requried to digitise sets of fonts 7,000 characters in each set – and the stranglehold that a couple of printing systems manufacturers, Shaken and Morisawa, have on the Japanese fonts market; Adobe Systems Japan says it is doing its bit, converting Postscript for four Japanese fonts – in all 10 new fonts are expected to be released by the end of the year; only four printers currently support Japanese Postscript – DEC KPS-40, Apple LaserWriter NTX-J, NEC PR-602/PS and QMS Colourscript, but Adobe expects three more to have Postscript support before the end of 1990; the disk space needed for downloadable Japanese fonts means that every Apple NTX-J printer has to be supplied with a 40Mb hard disk.
