Is there such a thing as a North Korean font?

When news broke earlier this week that one of the clues pointing investigators to Pyongyang’s culpability in the sinking of the Cheonan, the South Korean vessel that was sent to Davy Jones’s locker by a mysterious explosion in late March, was a North Korean font, I was intrigued. What did that mean? I pictured something like what you might see in North Korean propaganda posters:

So I asked Martin Heijdra, a reference librarian and East Asian typography expert at Princeton (whose specialty, he told me, is actually Chinese), what he thought of the matter. Without having seen the text in question, here’s what he emailed:

As one professor here once said: the footnotes of today (in this case, yesterday) are the headlines of tomorrow … I can anticipate the following issues though, and would have a hard time coming up with any other:

(1) Yes, there are some consistent differences in certain letters between North Korean and South Korean practice (there is a difference between a Northern and Southern ? e.g.)
(2) The reported syllable, ? , however does NOT contain such letters.
(3) therefore, we get into stylistic differences. In the most commonly used styles, outside the letters noted above, differences would be, I would think, undetectable, just as they are between different font companies–the standard styles are, well, standard; the differences are elsewhere. Yes, the whole array of display/ornamented fonts is very different in North Korea and South Korea as far as I have studied them (not since 2006 or so!), but those fancy decorative fonts are unlikely to have been used on a torpedo.
(4) According to my Korean reference colleague, Hyoungbae Lee, photos of the alleged font have not been released. Some news actually states it was not a font at all, but handwriting.
(5) Moreover, North-Korean style fonts, whether produced in North Korea or by Korean companies in Japan, together with the software add-ons necessary to use them on computers,  have been available for purchase in Japan, Singapore, China etc. (That’s where I got some of my original information from).
(6) Hence, this piece of evidence is rather shaky. 

Later, Lee chimed in with the photograph of the font, noting it is “handwritten with a marker” — meaning, Heijdra said, that “all discussion of ‘North Korean font’ is useless.” Here’s the image:

Any other Korean font experts want to weigh in?

UPDATE: More on the font here:

After finding the “smoking gun” on Saturday, the investigators thoroughly examined and analyzed the piece. The marking appeared to be handwritten, and Army Brig. Gen. Yun Jong-seong, head of the scientific investigation bureau of the joint probe, said an analysis of the ink, although it will take time, may further reinforce the team’s conclusions.

“No country [other than North Korea] marks a torpedo component with a Korean letter,” General Hwang added.