When working with western scripts it is common to use bold and italic
to make things stand out. Now I can imagine that italic/oblique of
asian characters may not make sense - but how do users of such scripts
make the "standout" distinction - colour?
Italic and bold 'fonts' exist for Japanese as well. I hesitate to call
them fonts because usually they are not made by design but in a algorithmic
way, aka they wont look very nice. Probably "bold" and "italic" in Japanese
exists, because they exist in western fonts (compatibility).
While bold and italics exist, its far away from fine typography to
use them. (Their are exceptions, but we are not a typographers list)
The normal way is to use a MINCHO font (e.g the standard heisei-mincho;
read it as "Times" for western scripts) for normal text and a more rounded
GOTHIC fonts for "italics". (Another typographical solution is using
katakana instead of hiragana).
Another very common way is to underdot (= underline not with a line but
with filled or unfilled circles; or just dots like our dots.)
BTW, just to make things a little more complicated, 'underdots', punctuation
and some other characters will change their shape (= code-point) if
printed vertically. So if you change view from horizontal to vertical
some character conversion is necessary.
Be that as it may - to present western text in the normal manner it would
be useful to be able to rely on there being a bold (screen) and to a lesser
extent an italic (print) version of a particular font.
I don't see any problems to use bolded Japanese in man-pages and to some
extend in technical documentation etc.
Andreas Marcel
