Format East Asian characters

Illustrator provides a variety of options for formatting East Asian characters. For example, you can set Asian Open Type font attributes, use Tate-chu-yoko, Aki, Warichu, Mojisoroe, Mojikumi, Kinsoku, Burasagari, and Kurikaeshi Moji Shori. In addition, you can combine Asian and Roman fonts and create composite fonts.

By default, Illustrator hides East Asian type options in the Character panel, Paragraph panel, OpenType panel, and Type menu.

Set Asian OpenType font attributes

Asian OpenType fonts may include a number of features that aren’t available in current PostScript and TrueType fonts. In addition, Asian OpenType fonts provide alternate glyphs for many characters.

Replace Asian characters with a different glyph form

Specify how leading is measured in Asian type

Rotate half-width characters in vertical text

The direction of half-width characters, such as Roman text or numbers, changes in vertical text. By default, half-width characters are rotated individually. If you don’t want half-width characters to rotate, select Standard Vertical Roman Alignment from the Character panel menu (Window > Type > Character).

Use Tate-chu-yoko

Tate-chu-yoko (also called Kumimoji and Renmoji) is a block of horizontal type laid out within vertical type lines. Using Tate-chu-yoko makes it easier to read half-width characters such as numbers, dates, and short foreign words in vertical text.

Use Aki

Aki is the white space before or after a character. Usually, fixed spacing is applied between the characters based on the Mojikumi setting for a paragraph. You can change the Mojikumi setting for special characters using the Insert Aki option in the Character panel. For example, to add a space before an opening parenthesis, use the Insert Aki (Left) option.

If you don’t see the Insert Aki or Tsume options, select Show East Asian Options in the Type preferences.

Use Warichu

The Warichu option in the Character panel menu decreases the typeface size of selected text to a percentage of the original and stacks the type—horizontally or vertically, according to the orientation—on multiple lines.

Align Asian characters with Mojisoroe

Mojisoroe is the alignment of characters in Asian type. When a line of text contains different sizes of characters, you can specify how to align text to the largest characters in the line: to the top, center, or bottom of the em box (right, center, and left for vertical frames), to the Roman baseline, or to the top or bottom of the ICF box (right or left for vertical frames). ICF (Ideographic Character Space) is the average height and width used by the font designer to design the ideographic characters that comprise a font.

In the Character panel menu, choose an option from the Character Alignment submenu:

• Roman Baseline: Aligns the small characters in a baseline to the large character.
• Em Box Top/Right, Em Box Center, or Em Box Bottom/Left: Aligns the small characters in a line to the specified position of the large character’s em box. In vertical text frames, Em Box Top/Right aligns the text to the right of the em box, and Em Box Bottom/Left aligns the text to the left of the em box.
• ICF Box Top/Right and ICF Box Bottom/Left: Aligns the small characters in a line to the ICF specified by the large characters. In vertical text frames, ICF Box Top/Right aligns the text to the right of the ICF, and ICF Box Bottom/Left aligns the text to the left of the ICF.

Use Mojikumi

Mojikumi specifies Japanese text composition for spacing of Japanese characters, Roman characters, punctuation, special characters, line start, line end, and numbers. You can also specify paragraph indents.

The existing character spacing rules in Illustrator follow the Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) specification, JISx4051‑1995. You can select from the predefined Mojikumi sets provided by Illustrator.

Furthermore, you can create specific Mojikumi sets. In a new Mojikumi set, you can edit the settings for spacing that you use a lot, such as the spacing between a period and subsequent opening parenthesis. For example, you might create an interview format in which you want to have an em dash before a question, and answers enclosed in parentheses.

Select a Mojikumi set for a paragraph

Create a Mojikumi set

Work with Mojikumi sets

In Mojikumi Settings , do any of the following:

• To export a set, select Export. Illustrator saves the file in MJK format.

• To import a set, select Import, and select an MJK file.

• To delete a set, select it from the Name drop-down and then select Delete. All the text to which the deleted Mojikumi set was applied will return to the default settings.

  You cannot delete predefined Mojikumi sets.
  

Use Kinsoku

Kinsoku Shori specifies line break rules for Japanese text. Characters that cannot be placed at the beginning or end of a line are known as Kinsoku characters. Illustrator has hard Kinsoku sets and soft Kinsoku sets. Soft or weak kinsoku sets omit long vowel symbols and small Hiragana characters. You can use the existing sets, or add or delete Kinsoku characters to create new sets.

You can also define hanging characters for hanging Japanese punctuation and define characters that cannot be split when a line is exceeded.

You can specify whether to push in or push out text so that Kinsoku characters are not placed inappropriately.

Select Kinsoku settings for a paragraph

In the Paragraph panel, choose an option from the Kinsoku Set drop-down:

• None: Turns off the use of Kinsoku.
• Soft/Hard: Prevents selected characters from appearing at the beginning or at the end of a line.

Create a Kinsoku set

Use Kinsoku sets

In the Kinsoku Shori Settings dialog, do any of the following:

• To export a Kinsoku set, select Export. Illustrator saves the file in KSK format.

• To import a Kinsoku set, select Import, and select a KSK file

• To delete a Kinsoku set, choose the Kinsoku set you want to delete from the Kinsoku Set drop-down, and then select Delete Set.

  You cannot delete predefined Kinsoku settings.

Specify a Kinsoku line-breaking option

Kinsoku Shori or Mojikumi must be selected to use the following line-breaking options.

From the Paragraph panel menu, choose Kinsoku Shori Type and then choose one of the following methods:

• Push In First: Moves characters up to the previous line to prevent prohibited characters from ending or beginning a line.
• Push Out First: Moves characters down to the next line to prevent prohibited characters from ending or beginning a line.
• Push Out Only: Always moves characters down to the next line to prevent prohibited characters from ending or beginning a line. A push-in is not attempted.

Set Bunri-Kinshi on and off

When you select Bunri-Kinshi, the characters specified in the Bunri-Kinshi section of the Kinsoku Shori Settings dialog will not be split.

In the Paragraph panel, choose Bunri-Kinshi from the panel menu.

Specify a Burasagari option

Burasagari lets single‑byte periods, double‑byte periods, single‑byte commas, and double‑byte commas fall outside the paragraph bounding box.

Use Kurikaeshi Moji Shori

You can control how repeated characters in Japanese text are handled using the Kurikaeshi Moji Shori option in the Paragraph panel. By default, a repeat character mark substitutes the second character when two identical characters follow one after the other. When you select Kurikaeshi Moji Shori , both characters are displayed if they are separated by a line break.

Related resources

• Rotate type
• Kern and track
• About Unicode
• About character sets and alternate glyphs
• OpenType fonts
• OpenType panel overview
• Glyphs panel overview

Talk to us