[Japanese]
Mona Font
Last Modified: Sat Oct 8 18:02:04 EDT 2005 (10/09, 07:02 JST)
Project Page |
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Installation
NOTICE:
As of Sep. 2005, Monafont is not actively (or barely) maintained.
For those who are using outline fonts, see also
IPA monafont project
which tries to adjust IPA-provided fonts for text arts.
What is Mona Font?
Mona Font is a Japanese proportional font which allows you to view
Japanese text arts correctly. Mona Font is based on
Shinonome Font,
a Japanese font developed by /efont/ Project.
Currently Mona Font is available on X11, Windows and MacOS X (Cocoa).
What is a "Japanese text art"?
A text art (sometime called ASCII art) is an image composed with letters.
Here "Japanese" means that it uses not only the ASCII character set,
but also various kinds of Japanese characters such as Kanji.
Since there are thousands of Japanese characters,
it makes the images much expressive and brings a huge variety to them.
Text arts are used to express some emotional responses and
pretty popular among some Japanese web communities.
Sometimes they elaborate text arts to simply imitate pictures.
Screenshots:
Here are several screenshots of text arts, posted in
Ni-channeru BBS (Channel Two BBS).
You need to install Mona Font to view the original HTML files correctly.
Historical
Comics, TV
Japanese Anime Stuff
Others
Why do I need a special font for viewing text arts?
The text arts above are composed with proportional fonts, so
overall impressions of the images are highly affected by the width
of each letter. However it depends on the fonts varied in users'
environments. Not surprisingly, since most users on the Internet
are now using Microsoft Windows, the majority of people uses MS P
Gothic (Japanese proportional font developed by Microsoft) to
compose images. But it causes discrepancy of composed images in
other systems such as Linux or MacOS. Our goal is to provide a
standard font for text arts in various formats which gives to
users a consistent image of a text art. (Surprisingly, many
people using UN*X desire to view these arts on their terminals!)
Currently Mona Font is available in a standard BDF format for
X11 and TrueType format (TTF) for Mac OS X. Unfortunately it is
not supported in Mac OS 9 or older since Mac OS 9 doesn't display
Japanese proportional fonts correctly. We are also developing
tools to manipulate TTF files for converting fonts between these
formats.
What is "Mona"?
Mona Font is named after a widely known character "Omae Mona
(a.k.a. Mona)" among Japanese web communities. The old story
tells us that Mona was first posted at a certain board in Ni-channeru BBS (Channel Two
BBS), the biggest Japanese web discussion group, which consists of about
400 boards for different kinds of topics. It began when one guy
posted "You guys have too much time on your hands" with this
character and another guy replied with the same one speaking
"Omae Mona!" (kind of meaning "You too, loser!"). Since the
board was such a hostile environment, many people started using
him against immature threats. And then he eventually became the
mascot of Ni-channeru.
Mona was not based on any existing cartoon character. Nobody
knows who created him in fact, because people in
Ni-channeru prefer to stay anonymous basically. For the
reason that they loved him for his look and its reproductivity (it
can be easily reused by replacing the words in the balloon), Mona
spread to other discussion communities in a flash. Since then hundreds
of derivative characters are created from Mona, and now people
living in Ni-channeru are developing their own story using
these characters. They even have several special boards for this
only purpose.
There is another variety of characters called "Giko Hanyaan
(a.k.a. Giko Cat)", which originate from the older web forum named
Ayashii World (Strange World). Although it comes from
different origin, "Giko Cat" is also widely used in the
Ni-channeru community now and pretty popular. They are
regarded as mimicking cats, saying "Itte Yoshi!" (meaning "Clear off!").
|
|
| "Omae Mona" (Mona) |
"Giko Hanyaan" (Giko Cat) |
Installation
RedHat Linux
There is a RPM (or SRPM) package for RedHat Linux.
Obtain the latest RPM from the project download page.
Mac OS X
Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Others
There are also ports or packages for Debian, FreeBSD and NetBSD users.
See the folloing pages for details.
Changes
- monafont-2.90 (Sep. 9, 2003):
-
- True outlines added.
- JPY symbol in the Unicode bitmap fonts fixed.
- monafont-2.30-pre2 (Aug 5, 2003):
-
- Welcome back. Now we're using kochi-substitue as outlines.
- (Jun. 18) 2.30-pre release was withheld due to the license problem in Kochi-Gothic. Sad.
- monafont-2.22 (Dec 20, 2002):
-
- Added English documents.
- ISO-10646 (Unicode) supported for all font sizes.
- Updated 16pt glyphs.
- Optimized make_cmap and ttfpack (thanks to 18).
- monafont-2.21 (Jun 23, 2002):
-
- Moved to sourceforge.net.
- Synchronized with Shinonome-0.9.8.
- fixed a jis2unicode bug.
- AA patch by anonymous 638th is applied.
- Now supports Cyrillic and Greek in Windows version.
Todo
- Adjustment/fix.
- ISO-10646 (Unicode) support.
- Supporting outline fonts.
- There are some problems in Windows NT at
displaying extended characters, probably because
some Unicode mappings are not defined around U+FAxx (by anonymous 18th).
Acknowledgements
We thank to:
- Yasuyuki Furukawa (the original author of Shinonome Font, mkbold, and mkitalic)
- /efont/ Project
- NAGAO Sadakazu (mkbold)
- Toshiyuki Imamura and HANATAKA Shinya ({K12,K14,K16}-2000)
- Katsuya Odajima (a16rk)
- Hiroki Kano (bit2bdf)
- Anonymous 18th in Ni-Channeru BBS (omaemona, oremona, monak14-ext, lots of fixes)
- Anonymous 638th in Ni-Channeru BBS (AA patch)
- Yukihiro Nakai (RPM spec file for RedHat)
- Many people who tested Mona Font in Macintosh and Windows NT.
- Lots of Ni-Channerers and text art wizards!
Links
- IPA monafont project.
- /efont/ (Electronic Font Open Laboratory) Project,
developing Shinonome Font.
- A list of Japanese bitmap fonts available on X11
(in Japanese), by Hiroki Kano.
- Navi2ch for Emacs
an Emacs-based open source Ni-Channeru browser.
- Monazilla.org
(in Japanese), the directory site for a bunch of Ni-Channeru related tools.
- N.I.C.H. Monaic
(in Japanese), a GTk-based open source Ni-Channeru browser.
- goRua
(in Japanese), another GTk-based open source Ni-Channeru browser,
written with Ruby/GTk.
- Gikot
(in Japanese), a desktop mascot for X11 using Mona Font.
- Magic NC
(in Japanese), a diskless Linux cartridge adopted Mona Font.
- q2ch
(in Japanese), another Ni-Channeru browser for Linux Zaurus.
- Kita
(in Japanese), another Ni-Channeru browser on KDE.
