A few hours ago, Frank Tang gave us a link. It led us to a page about a display bug in Netscape. This bug causes the Japanese period to sometimes display incorrectly.
1) Momoi-san, just between you and me, I've seen better-looking kana on my Game Boy.
2) Your problem with the ugly kana is not unique: I have some kind of Arial Unicode font where the kana give you the unshakable impression that they were designed by someone who never took a good look at Japanese text. Try writing "raishuu" in hiragana with this font to see what I mean.
3) Your bad period would probably work very well in tategaki. It looks to be in the right place for that. I think what you have is a font display problem. Does the same problem occur with other fonts?
Besides all this, I have seen in Windows 3.1 a special font called "Small fonts". It was a set of bitmap fonts for small display sizes. I think one of these is necessary for Japanese. And as for the kana, just look at any old Game Boy game to see the tricks they use for legibility, such as writing dakuten as two vertical (not diagonal!) strokes to distinguish them from handakuten.
What we need for the period is at least 3 glyphs: Japanese tategaki, Japanese yokogaki, and Chinese. (Do the Chinese put their period on the line? Once I read a bilingual Chinese/English magazine, which had Chinese text I could refer to for this, but it's been ages since I last saw it.)
While we're at it, the bar (as in "raamen" and "meeru") needs 2 glyphs.
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