Playing with Japanese Fonts

For quite some time now, I have been looking for a good-looking and license-compatible Japanese font set that could be included in Haiku R1. Haiku does have a Japanese font called Konatsu, and while it does work, it is not very well suited as a general font for the overal UI. I think I have found something that is worth taking a close look: the VLGothic font set.

2ch+ running in Haiku using VLGothic font set

VLGothic combines the latin characters from the M+ Fonts Project (these are VERY good looking fonts!) with the Sazanami Gothic Japanese font by the Electronic Font Open Laboratory. The result is a very good looking and well balanced TrueType font set with support for Japanese characters.

Since a picture is always better than a thousand words, I have included a screenshot of Haiku using the VLGothic font set. What you see on the screenshot is 2ch+, a client app for Japan's biggest (and very controversial) online bulletin board; you can download the binary for Haiku from here.