Maniackers Design Fonts
June 2nd, 2007A design group that makes many fonts for free download, mainly katakana display faces but there is one kanji font albeit without the full range of glyphs. The display fonts show just how difficult a language can be to read in unfamiliar fonts.
–update 29Apr08–
The kana display fonts are directly mapped to keys; therefore you type the characters directly rather than using Kotoeri input (or the IME in Windows). Leaving your keyboard in romaji input, select the font as AL (Roman characters) HA (Hiragana glyphs) or KT (Katakana glyphs) then type away.
This is one time a Japanese keyboard is really useful as the kana glyphs are printed on the keys.
This is the layout of the keyboard I have.
An Apple Japanese wireless keyboard.
The underlying keyboard layout is the US keyboard.
Unfortunately the voiced characters using ゛and ゜are found using the shift key so a bit of guesswork is needed to find them especially for あいうえお and the ま row.
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