Minor variations of the fundamentally same shape
The font MS Gothic and MS Mincho differs in how to draw some strokes. Here are 2 examples:
The red strokes in MS Gothic are concave up, while in MS Mincho it is concave down. It seems that MS Gothic favors symmetry more than MS Mincho. Here are some more examples:
In MS Gothic, the blue stroke is a horizontal mirror of the red one.
However there are some notable exceptions that I found:
In the image above, MS Gothic and MS Mincho agree on stroke concavity.
All those examples suggest that concavity is up to the preference of the writer. MS Mincho’s style can be said to showcase wabi sabi more (wabi sabi is a Japanese view that states beauty is found in asymmetry and imperfection).
However, even on the same font there are variations for some shape. I’ll illustrate MS Gothic’s case.
The first is regarding the red stroke in the 木 shape. In the top row, all of them are concave up. In the second row, where the shape appears on the half left of a “horizontal flow layout”, it is concave down and slightly displaced below.
A horizontal flow layout is a layout where items are arranged from left to right. Constrast it with a vertical flow layout. In 数 the 木 shape is inside a vertical flow layout so it is drawn like the normal 木. This illustration shows the difference between a vertical and horizontal flow layout:
Next is the shape of 立:
Appearing by itself, the blue stroke is unconnected to any other stroke and the red stroke is connected to the lowermost stroke. For the 2 kanji to the right of the first one, the stroke corresponding to the red one is connected to the top horizontal stroke also. For the last kanji, all of them are connected to the top and bottom horizontal strokes.
The shape of 父 also varies:
In the last kanji, the red stroke is concave down, different from the first two.
The last example is 土:
In the top row, the lowermost horizontal stroke is… well… horizontal. However, in the bottom row, where 土 appears in the left side of a horizontal flow layout, the lowermost stroke has a positive slope.
There are many more examples that I found. Because some variation rules can be found, it casts doubt that the stroke detail (concavity, connectivity, slope, etc) is completely up to the writer. Whatever the case is, all those variations makes the task of memorizing the shape harder for anyone who want to follow the style of MS Gothic (or Mincho) as close as possible.
