“Our way. Or the highway.”
By Dr Ken Lunde
“Fine.”
There are certainly lots of good quotes from The Matrix (1999), and the one above is particularly relevant to the subject matter of this article.
The Intrigue
First things first. I first became intrigued—or perhaps more accurately, obsessed—by highway signage in Japan during a business trip there a few years ago. This was during my Adobe years.
Anyway, this all started while I was visiting my in-laws in Yaizu (焼津市), which I make a point of doing whenever I am in Japan. The TV was on, and we were watching a program that involved travel to an area of Japan that gets a lot of snow during the winter months, perhaps somewhere in Hokkaidō (北海道) or the northern part of Honshū (本州). I noticed a peculiar form of the kanji 州 (U+5DDE) on a road sign that used a single horizontal bar in lieu of the three short dot-like strokes. Um, wow. Another kanji that gets the same treatment is 洲 (U+6D32). Below is an image that shows the standard form of these two kanji, using Source Han Sans Medium, and the forms that may appear on older highway signage:
I then spent the next few years trying to find this apparent variant form of 州 elsewhere, but never found anything. Until the end of 2021…
The Discovery
I attended ATypI All Over 2021, which took place from 2021-12-02 to 2021-12-04 as an online conference. One of the presentations that took place on the first day of the conference, Empirical Study of the Legibility of Arabic Highway Signs by Dr Shaima Elbardawil, brought back this memory of the variant form of 州. The presentation abstract describes the problem quite succinctly:
With the increasing prevalence of the automobile, the transmission of information through the visual means of signs became critical. This importance is related to the safety problems that followed the growth of the highway system and the continuous increase in traffic. Legible visual communication is an essential component of traffic control for safe urban navigation, and highway signs are the most used visual devices for controlling traffic.
To effectively communicate to drivers and other users, road signage must be easily seen and quickly comprehended at variable speeds, and road sign legibility is essential to comprehensibility. Researchers have studied the legibility of the English-language Latin typefaces used on US road guide signs with respect to a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors — specifically the Standard Highway Signs Alphabets (Font Series) and the Clearview typefaces. In contrast, there are no typeface design guidelines or legibility studies for Arabic typefaces used on highway signs. This presentation discusses an empirical research study that examines the legibility of Arabic road guide signs with a particular reference to the United Arab Emirates.
Of course, this problem applies to scripts other than Arabic, and when one considers the complexity of kanji (aka ideographs), it is no wonder that special forms of some kanji have been used for highway signage in Japan.
While attending the session for the presentation, which included a simultaneous chat session, I brought up the topic of special forms of kanji being used on highway signage in Japan, and if memory serves, someone I know at Morisawa stated that such a font actually exists. It is called GD-高速道路ゴシックJA (GD Highway Gothic JA), which is free. The purpose of this font is to mimic the so-called 公団ゴシック (Public Gothic) font, which has been used on highway signage since 1963. According to this article, Hiragino, which has been Apple’s system font since the release of Mac OS X over 20 years ago, is replacing this font for highway signage due to its high legibility.
Now for some examples…
The following kanji show how the radical that means rain, 雨, appears when it appears as itself and when used as a component, which results in two of the four short horizontal strokes being removed: 雨雪雫雲零雷電需霊霜鱈.
Another good example is the radical that means heart, 心, whose third and fourth strokes become short vertical strokes or dots when used as a component: 心志応思恩患悪悶意愛慮慰憩憶.
Finally, the following kanji are interesting, because they exhibit changes that are made to simplify the shapes of kanji, either through stroke reduction or other means: 傘北壇幾機磯闇駒鬱鳩鷹麿.
The Analysis
Noting errors or inconsistencies in typeface designs, particularly East Asian ones, is something that I have been doing for decades. Furthermore, as someone who has 30 years of experience developing East Asian fonts as a profession, I can confidently state that no typeface is without errors. This typeface is no exception, though it is not clear whether the inconsistencies that I discovered are unintended or due to inconsistencies in the actual highway signage that served as the basis for its glyphs. In any case, the following image shows some inconsistencies in the shapes of some components, with the first row representing what appears to be the intended component shape (because a larger number of glyphs exhibit the shape), and the second row representing an example of an outlier with a different shape, with the relevant areas highlighted:
The Conclusion
Exploring the glyphs of this font in greater detail is something that I highly recommend, and speaking of recommendations, I also recommend installing and using the OpenType/CFF version, because it includes glyphs for a few more kanji than the TrueType version. As far as I can tell, the OpenType/CFF version includes glyphs for the following 1,235 kanji, which you can Copy&Paste:
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About the Author
Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over twenty-eight years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, and published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.
