Vertical Japanese Text to PDF (原稿用紙)
Paste Japanese text and get it back as a printable PDF laid out the traditional way: vertically, with columns running right to left, one character per cell, on genkō yōshi (原稿用紙) manuscript paper. If that term is new to you, it is the grid paper Japanese schools, literary competitions and publishers have used for a century to measure and submit writing — and the reason a Japanese assignment is set in 枚 (sheets) rather than in words. Nothing is uploaded; the PDF is typeset character by character in your browser, with a real Japanese font embedded, so the text stays selectable and searchable rather than becoming a picture.
The PDF is typeset in your browser, character by character, with a real Japanese font embedded into the file. Your manuscript is never uploaded.
What is 原稿用紙 (genkō yōshi)?
It is Japanese manuscript paper: a printed grid where every character — kanji, kana, and each punctuation mark — occupies exactly one square cell. Text runs top to bottom, and the columns run right to left, so page one starts in the top-right corner. The standard sheet is 20 cells down by 20 columns across: 400 characters, which is why Japanese schools, literary prizes and publishers state length in 枚 (sheets) rather than words. “原稿用紙10枚” means 4,000 characters.
Getting this right in a word processor is genuinely awkward, because vertical Japanese is not horizontal text turned sideways. 、 and 。 move from the bottom-left of their cell to the top-right; brackets, dashes and the long vowel mark ー rotate 90°; small kana (っ ゃ ゅ ょ) shift up and right. This tool places every character individually, so all three happen.
Nothing laid out yet
Why this is harder than rotating the page
Vertical Japanese is not horizontal Japanese turned ninety degrees. Three separate things change per character, and a tool that skips them produces something a Japanese reader spots instantly:
- Punctuation moves. 、 and 。 sit in the lower-left of their square when text runs horizontally. Set vertically they belong in the upper right of the cell.
- Some characters rotate. The long-vowel mark ー, dashes, and every kind of bracket — 「」（）【】 — turn 90° so they run with the column rather than across it.
- Small kana shift. っ ゃ ゅ ょ nudge up and to the right within their cell, rather than sitting dead centre like a full-size kana.
On top of that there is 禁則処理 (kinsoku shori), Japanese line-breaking law: a column may not begin with 、。」）or a small kana, and may not end with 「（. When the break would land badly, the offending character is pushed into the next column and the previous one finishes a cell short — exactly what a Japanese word processor does. You can switch that off if you want strict, mechanical cell counting instead.
Emphasis dots (圏点)
Japanese does not italicise for emphasis — it puts a small dot beside each character of the emphasised run, to the right of the column in vertical text. Wrap anything in 《《 and 》》 in your source text and it comes out dotted. That is the same convention used by 青空文庫, Japan's public-domain text archive, so text copied from there already carries the markup.
What “10枚” actually means
A standard sheet is 20 cells down by 20 columns across — 400 characters, always counted the same way whether the cells are full or not. So a competition asking for 原稿用紙 10枚 is asking for 4,000 characters, and a 800-character school essay is 2枚. The live counter above gives you both figures: the real page count of your PDF at whatever grid you chose, and the 枚 figure in 400-character sheets, which is the number a submission form wants.
Questions fréquentes
What is genkō yōshi (原稿用紙)?
It is Japanese manuscript paper: a sheet printed with a grid of squares where every character occupies exactly one square - kanji, kana, and each punctuation mark alike. Text is written from the top of a column downward, and the columns advance right to left, so you start in the top-right corner of the page. The standard sheet holds 20 characters in each of 20 columns, which is 400 characters, and that fixed count is the whole point: it turns 'how long is this piece of writing' into something you can measure by counting sheets. Japanese school essays, literary prize submissions and publishers' manuscript requirements are all still specified in 枚 (sheets) because of it.
Is this free, and is my text uploaded anywhere?
Free, unlimited, no account, and nothing is uploaded. The layout and the PDF are both produced in your browser - the only thing downloaded from the network is the Japanese font that gets embedded into the file. That matters more than usual here, because the people who need this tool are typically working on an unpublished manuscript, a competition entry or a school assignment.
Why do I need a special tool - can't Word do vertical Japanese?
Japanese editions of Word can set vertical text, and dedicated Japanese writing software like 一太郎 does genkō yōshi properly. But if you are working in an English-language Word, Google Docs or Pages, vertical Japanese ranges from awkward to unavailable, and a true character grid with correct punctuation placement is not something any of them will give you. The common workaround - screenshotting a CSS 'writing-mode: vertical-rl' page - produces an image: the text is no longer selectable or searchable, the print quality depends on your screen resolution, and you get no control over the character grid at all. This places each character individually into a real PDF instead.
Will the text in the PDF still be selectable and searchable?
Yes. Every character is drawn as real text with an embedded font, not rasterised, so you can select it, copy it, search it in a PDF reader and have a screen reader announce it. The font is Sawarabi Mincho under the SIL Open Font License - a Mincho (serif) face, which is the conventional typeface for vertical Japanese prose and manuscript paper. Only the glyphs your text actually uses are embedded, so a few pages of prose add tens of kilobytes rather than the font's full 3.5 MB.
What paper sizes and grid layouts can I use?
A4, B5, B4 and A5, which covers what Japanese printers and schools use - B5 and B4 in particular are standard Japanese paper sizes that rarely appear on Western tools. The grid is adjustable: 20 × 20 is the classic 400-character sheet, 20 × 10 is the 200-character sheet with wider cells often used for younger pupils, and you can set any other combination if a specific submission asks for one. There is also a plain vertical mode with no printed grid, for when you want traditional layout without the manuscript-paper look, and you can keep the grid geometry but hide the rules if you are printing onto pre-printed sheets.
How should punctuation and paragraphs be handled on manuscript paper?
Each paragraph starts one cell in from the top of its column - that indent is not optional in Japanese prose, and it is switched on by default here. Every punctuation mark takes its own cell, including 、 and 。, and closing brackets sit in the cell after the text they close. The main convention this tool applies automatically is kinsoku shori: a column may not open with 、。」 or a small kana, nor end with 「 or （, so a character that would break the rule is pushed to the next column. The one convention it does not implement is 'ぶら下げ', where a closing 。 is allowed to hang outside the last cell instead of being pushed - that is a house style rather than a universal rule.
Why were some of my characters dropped from the PDF?
The embedded font covers JIS X 0208 level 1, roughly 3,300 ideographs including all 2,136 jōyō kanji - which is everything modern prose needs. Rarer level-2 characters, some old-form kanji and certain name characters are not in it. Rather than emit a PDF with blank boxes where those should be, the tool checks coverage before it builds and lists every character it could not draw, so you know exactly what to substitute. Classical or Meiji-era text is the usual case where this comes up.
Can I use this for a Japanese school assignment or a literary prize entry?
It produces correctly laid out manuscript paper, but check the submission rules before relying on it. Many Japanese competitions and universities still require handwritten genkō yōshi, and where printed submissions are accepted they often specify a font size, a particular grid, or their own downloadable template. Where a printed PDF is acceptable this gives you a proper one, and the 枚 counter tells you whether you have hit the required length - but the requirements are set by whoever you are submitting to, not by this tool.