I’m mostly using WaniKani on my mobile device, so I’m more used to the font there. But when I occassionally switch to PC for reviews, it feels like a completely different font, but only since I installed the Japanese Keyboard IME for Windows 10! The PC browser font feels more bold and horizontally strechted compared to the smartphone browser font (and the PC font before that installation) now. Does the IME keyboard somehow reconfigure displayed Japanese fonts in my browser? To assure myself that I’m not going crazy, I made two pics from both devices and cropped them:
DO YOU SEE THE DIFFERENCES? (whispers) do you?
Sadly, I don’t have an image to compare to from before I installed the IME keyboard, so maybe the thing about the keyboard is just me. But the fonts are definitely not the same.
Am I going mad over a font change, feeling sympathy for the smartphone font and slowly developing deep hatred over the PC font, accussing it for any wrong answers I made in reviews?
You’re not going mad, but if your accuracy depends on text using the exact same font then you will likely have tons of issues down the road with recognition. Especially if you ever encounter fonts that emulate a handwritten style or actually encounter handwritten kanji because they aren’t going to look 100% like the fonts in your screenshots. I would suggest you use something like this to eliminate this crutch of needing one specific font to be accurate:
