BIZ UDPGothic

In BIZ UDPGothic the kanji lose their hane and geta. The hane is the small hook at the end of a stroke, the geta are the short verticals that poke out below the bottom horizontal, and both are optional enough that Morisawa left them off to make each character clearer and easier to tell from its neighbors.

That is universal design in the Japanese sense: letters built after extensive testing with real readers so that individual characters are easy to distinguish and long text is easy to follow. Morisawa and TypeBank aimed the BIZ UD family at education and business documents. The counters and other inner spaces were tuned so that the large face of each character keeps its balance, and the kana are drawn a little smaller than the kanji, which gives long passages a gentle rhythm.

The P in the name matters. BIZ UDGothic sets its kana at full width, each in the same square; this version gives them proportional widths, which suits running text. For tables and forms where characters should stack in a grid, the full-width BIZ UDGothic is the one to pick.

When Morisawa released the family through Google Fonts, Google also put it into Google Workspace, and Google Education pointed out that it brings their tools in line with the fonts most used in Japanese educational publishing.

2 weights, Regular and Bold. The files hold 11,741 characters, with Latin, Greek and Cyrillic beside the Japanese, and a slashed zero for anyone typing codes or IDs.