[tlug] Pretty Japanese fonts?

[John Fremlin <john@example.com>]

Thanks for everybody who has helped out so far!

John Fremlin wrote:
> Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:
> > Hi John, glad you got that to work OK.  Like Stephen, I'm curious what
> > the audience did not like. After all, these are fonts designed by
> > Japanese themselves. Do they have any positive likes? Sadly, many
> > researchers in the scientific sphere seem to like brush-stroke-style
> > (gyou-shotai) bold characters for presentations. Headache in 10
> > seconds....
>
> I had tried the IPA fonts before I started whining about it to the list 
> and you.

I've asked around and delved into the issue a bit further.

The font I was using was Cyberbit. My boss, Mr Kuroda, dislikes it 
because it is too regular -- it doesn't use a brush stroke style and so 
does not "appear Japanese". I suppose this is what Gernot is referring 
to regarding gyou-shotai.

Mr Huang, a coworker from Shanghai, tells me that this font is of the 
"song" type of Chinese font (the "hei" type is like sans-serif).

All in all, it seems that this problem is not confined to LaTeX, but 
that generally the free fonts for Japanese are not very beautiful. This 
page seems to confirm it 
http://my.opera.com/aikishugyo/blog/show.dml/1707685

Just to confirm, I've tried all three font families offered by CJK LaTeX 
Mincho, Gothic and Marumoji and they were all met with disapproval.

I think that in order to please my Japanese audience, a brush stroke 
style font is required. Any ideas very welcome! Has there been any 
progress on this front recently?

(When I was in China, on the other hand, people often commented that my 
default font in Linux was much nicer than the MS Windows XP one.)