As Google makes progress on supporting Japanese web typography, we invite designers and developers to experiment with these Japanese web fonts now available from Google Fonts Early Access.

This repository contains the type specimen site built to showcase the collection.

The following instructions are for maintaining the type specimen site itself. To learn more about the Google Fonts + 日本語 collection and for HTML + CSS code snippets, head to the type specimen site!

This project is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it.

You don’t need to run the project locally to update basic metadata—you can even edit it directly on GitHub if you choose.

Font metadata is stored in src/data/fonts.js. (It’s a JSON file, but with comments.)

If a font has graduated from Google Fonts Early Access, change earlyAccess from true to false, and ensure the google_fonts_id is still accurate. This is used to display the HTML and CSS code samples.

The following instructions are for running the site locally, particularly if you’d like to add a new specimen!

To run this static site locally, you’ll need to have a recent stable version of Node.js installed. (Node.js isn’t used in production and you don’t really need to know much about it to contribute to the site. hjs-webpack, a preconfigured version of Webpack, is used as the static site generator and compile the Sass files, metadata, and React components into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

To get started, clone this project locally by running the following command in your terminal:

# Clone the project
https://github.com/googlefonts/japanese googlefonts-japanese

# Move into the project directory
cd googlefonts-japanese

Node.js comes with npm, the package manager for JavaScript. Use it to install the project’s dependencies (the other JavaScript libraries and tools listed in the package.json file) by running the following command:

# Install dependencies
npm install

Now, you’re ready to run the project in the browser. Run the following commands in your terminal:

# Run the project at http://localhost:3000
npm start

You can compile the site to static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at any point using the following command:

npm run build

This will compile the site to a ./build directory using Webpack.

If you are contributing a new specimen, don’t worry about deploying the site. Make your changes on a branch, and then open those as a new Pull Request on GitHub.

If you have permissions on the repository, the latest version of the site can be deployed to GitHub Pages by running:

# Build the site and commit it to the gh-pages branch
npm run deploy

To deploy to the staging domain, you’ll need permission from @kennethormandy. Run the following command:

npm run stage