is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font on Japanese systems beginning with Windows Vista. Meiryo was created out of a growing need for legible CJK fonts compatible with Microsoft ClearType's hinting and subpixel rendering system. It was meant to increase the legibility of Japanese text on LCD screens, and would thus take the place of MS Gothic and MS Mincho, both of which had been widely used at the time. While most Latin fonts were able to use hinting at any size, most CJK fonts were incompatible with the technology (with the exception of some fonts such as Arial Unicode MS). Meiryo did away with embedding bitmap images into fonts for use at small sizes, a strategy employed by many CJK fonts (including MS Gothic and MS Mincho) to compensate for a lack of hinting support. Meiryo UI Meiryo UI is a version that uses condensed kana and reduced line height compared to Meiryo, introduced with Windows 7 and is also available as an update in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Similar to MS Gothic, the Meiryo UI fonts are bundled with the same Meiryo TTC files of respective weights. Characteristics Meiryo was designed as the enhanced version of Verdana, regarded as a highly readable font. The font's baseline was raised slightly to improve readability when mixing Latin and CJK texts. Meiryo glyphs for kanji and kana also have a height-to-width ratio of 95:100. In previous Japanese fonts distributed with Windows, embedded bitmap glyphs are used whenever font size is set to around 9 points. Unlike previous fonts designed for CJK environments, Meiryo contains no embedded bitmaps. To improve readability under small font sizes without using embedded bitmaps, TrueType hinting language was used for stroke-reduction. Similar technology was used on MingLiU and PMingLiU versions 5.03. Meiryo is developed to comply with JIS X 0213:2004 and can also use the newest set of personal name characters provided by the Japanese Minister of Justice. In addition, it contains OpenType tables for JIS78, JIS83, JIS90 forms for legacy usages. Meiryo supports following OpenType layout features for Cyrillic, Greek, Han Ideographic, Kana, Latin scripts: nalt, afrc, dnom, dlig, frac, fwid, hwid, hkna, ital, jp78, jp83, jp90, numr, qwid, ruby, sinf, zero, smcp, c2sc, liga, sups, twid, vkna, vrt2, vert, kern. Meiryo