Looking for Japanese Type Font

[The Mad Plumber]

I've scheduled a new AutoCAD project in my database. I noted, however, that the item that I will be illustrating in AutoCAD features some parts that have raised text on them, and some of that text happens to be Japanese. My project notebook does not appear to have any fonts that feature Japanese characters. The new family computer appears to have some eastern fonts in its library, but, because of my ignorance of other languages, I'm not sure if the characters are Chinese or Japanese.

I'm also vague as to how many character in the Japanese language I would be confronting. Judging by the one eastern font that I'm looking at now, it appears to features characters ranging from U+3021 to U+FA2D. I'm not exactly sure how AutoCAD or even Adobe Illustrator will tolerate characters that take up an entire word of memory. I also don't want to do the buffoonish thing of producing the wrong characters because of my inability to distinguish them, thus turning the text into gibberish.

If anyone knows a good source for Japanese fonts or might know which fonts I already have on the family computer are Japanese, it would be appreciated. Thanks!

[caucasoididiot]

I can help out with that a bit, though my knowledge of font arcana is a bit limited. What input method are you using? My mac came bundled with a basic set of international fonts and the input systems for them. If yours works anything like mine, you'll be typing roman letters which will then change into phonetic Japanese. It'll then give you the options for kanji if it recognizes any. Here's an illustration:

Roman: nihongo

Phonetic hiragana: にほんご

Kanji: 日本語

There's also a second syllabary called katakana. If you see options for both of those then you certainly have a Japanese font. I'm not sure about Chinese input, but as they have no syllabary it's probably quite different.

I also have a lot of TrueType Japanese fonts, some quite fancy.

[The Mad Plumber]

My project notebook runs on Windows XP. The new family computer is Windows 7.

Alright, I'm looking at Microsoft YaHei, and after the symbols, it appears to have characters identified as being hiragana, katakana, and bopomofo. This must be Japanese. Then there's a very long continuation of characters that are only identified as "CJK Ideograph Extension". On the instrument, the string of characters above "NEVER TOUCH THE LENS" don't look particularly complex and most of them might be in those first sets of characters. However, I do see that there are some particularly complex characters in that string as well.

[caucasoididiot]

"Bopomofo" mystifies me, but if you have hiragana and katakana you definitely have Japanese.

Can you post images of the characters in question? I can probably get you an appropriate character string from that, and can even run them by a native speaker to be sure.

My fonts came from an outfit called "Dynalab," but that was many years ago. I've cruised quite a few free font sites over the years, but as a full kanji set is quite involved the free ones usually only involve the phonetic characters. Of course, if you don't need anything fancy whatever font you already have will probably work.

[The Mad Plumber]

I'll get them scanned tomorrow and send you a note. I appreciate it.

[caucasoididiot]

No sweat! Glad to be of help.