Font name with an "@" symbol; how they are different?

Question

In any application(on my Win 7 pc), when i try to choose font, the common dialog box pops-up. There, I see some font-names start with @. While the most others don't.

Why the @ symbol is used for? Are these fonts are different? How?

Answer 1

As Raymond Chen explains in his blog post titled Why do some font names begin with an at-sign?:

Fonts which begin with an @-sign are vertically-oriented fonts. They are used in languages like Chinese, Japanese, and (less often) Korean. The idea is that if you want to generate vertical text, you start with the horizontal version of the font and compose your document, then switch to the vertical version for printing.

Also see the Vertical Writing and Printing MSDN article, as well as Michael Kaplan's informative posts on the same subject.