The latest software acronym to take Japan by storm is DTP for DeskTop Publishing, complicated there by the variety and number of kanji or Chinese characters used: an indispensable feature in Japan is outline fonts (otherwise known as vector fonts) and font production systems – Japanese has 7,000 characters in the JIS first and second standard list alone, with the different fonts required increasing that number two to three-fold; until recently, outline fonts were created by a special designer and then converted to vector data, with such a system costing thousands of dollars – millions of yen; although Mitsubishi Corp was first cab off the rank by picking up the distributorship for a personal computer-based font creation system developed by software house Information and Control Laboratories, Sony is currently winning the desktop publishing battle by working with Dai Nippon Printing to develop low-cost systems to run on the Sony NEWS Unix workstation – it ported to the Sony machine a font production system from a US firm, UWR, thereby reducing the cost of such a system to around $45,000 from nearer $750,000; Mitsubishi has also dropped the price of its system to around $11,200; Ricoh has yet to price its system.
