Whenever I see the radical/character 令 in Japanese it looks like it does in the default font here, but the version Skritter gives me looks a little different, with the last two strokes like マ.

I know Skritter prefers handwritten styles generally but is this the most common form for this character when written by hand in Japanese? Even the stroke order diagram from my dictionary app is showing me how to write the printed form :(

This is a good one - I had to just ask a couple of teachers around the office, but I think I have about the best answer anyone can give for you.

According to these folks, the most correct form of handwriting the 令 character is the form provided by the skritter developers (the one which has a bottom half that resembles マ). One person said that when he was a child, he wrote 令 in its "correct" マ form but, as he grew older, he started to change it to the form you see in modern fonts.

In any case, both are okay to write and both are well understood. There doesn't seem to be a certain preference for one or the other, just that the typed form 令 is considered to be more of a shorthand.

Although knowing that, it seems strange that the fonts you see on the computer don't prefer the マ shape over the 令 shape. Pretty cool, anyway.

Awesome, exactly the sort of response I was looking for. Thanks!

The Japanese (and Korean) standard 令 is actually the more correct form according to the character evolution. See this page for the different standards and older forms of 令: http://www.zdic.net/z/15/zy/4EE4.htm . As can be seen it actually comes from 亼 + 卩. That was also how it was written by the great calligraphy masters (e.g., 欧阳询 and 颜真卿). The PRC, Taiwanese and Hong Kong standards probably comes from the cursive (行书) form.

By the way, your messages both display the Chinese standard for me. And I think it displays the Japanese standard for you since you have Japanese font enabled or as the default variant for in other fonts.

See this Wikipedia page for more info: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character