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IBM
Support proportional Cyrillic, Greek in Plex Sans JP
In Japanese documents, Cyrillic and Greek characters rarely appear, but they are sometimes used to write the names of Russian people, for example.
However, IBM Plex Sans JP contains full-width Cyrillic and Greek characters, so it is not beautiful.
Therefore, it deletes the Cyrillic and Greek monospaced fonts from IBM Plex Sans JP and replaces them with proportional fonts.
@mjabbink This question is for the original designers of Plex JP to answer. I don’t know the rationale why they’ve made these glyphs full width.
@BoldMonday This is an oversight and should get resolved. Cyrillic and Greek should have maintained their spacing from IBM Plex Sans.
I think the reason why the Cyrillic’s full-width instead of proportional is because in some of the Japanese Google fonts (and some of the other Japanese fonts), they’re also full-width. But for the Greek, I don’t know why they’re full-width. Here’s an example:
(But seriously they should be proportional.)
Traditionally Japanese (and Chinese too) treated Cyrillic and Greek as double-byte characters (in EUC/ISO 2022 encoding), so their appearance is made such that it will take out a full width character space (normal ASCII is one-byte and half width); a full set of full-width ASCII is repeated in double-byte range too so this difference is made to make it more visible.
However, since there is no more difference now, it is more beneficial to update Cyrillic and Greek to proportional width. This should be noted for the upcoming Chinese font too. (Ref. Source Han)
