This document has not been substatively updated in over a decade and is severely out of date. (It talks about Mac OS X 10.0 and Mac IE 5!) I have kept it available for historical interest only.

About the Hiragino Fonts with CSS

Mac OS X comes with new a family of high-quality Japanese fonts called Hiragino. The fonts also contain high-quality glyphs for the Western European subset of the Latin script. The glyphs for basic Greek and the Russian subset of the Cyrillic script look fine in isolation but are kerned to match the width of Kanji blocks. This makes the fonts ill-suited for Greek or Russian text.

Different applications see the names of the fonts differently. TextEdit sees the names transliterated to the Latin alphabet, while Mozilla and IE only understand the Japanese names. The style sheet for this page lists both the Japanese name and the transliterated name of each font, just in case.

When the Hiragino fonts are used through CSS, IE applies the fonts only to the Japanese characters. Mozilla applies the fonts to Latin characters as well.

Font Test

The CSS font-family for each font name is the font itself.

Screenshots

Display in Mozilla

Mozilla displays both Latin and Japanese text using the specified fonts

Display in IE

IE uses the specified fonts only for the Japanese characters

Quartz Rendering (from TextEdit)

The Quartz rendering has the best anti-aliasing