Really nice font! Native Japanese speaker here, and seeing furigana done purely in the font is very cool.
One small thing on the Japanese version of the page: in the "Ligatures do the work" section, 合字 itself only gets じ over 字, and 合 has no reading. It should be ごうじ. I guess 合字 isn't in the dictionary, so it falls back to single kanji, and 合 is skipped because it has several readings.
Automatic furigana is not really possible to be reliable considering readings heavily rely on context that can't be easily inferred, but I'm sure it will help some people who can't read very well.
You can run LLMs inside the shaping engine, so maybe you can use more advanced segmenting and transliteration algorithms? https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
This is very cool. Unfortunate that it gives the wrong pronunciation when words get split in a line wrap (e.g., 大学 got split between lines and changed to incorrect furigana for me).
When you control the content, I agree that ruby tags would be better, since they can easily handle alternative readings and also enable smarter automation to infer the correct reading from context.
But you could set this as the default system font for Japanese and enjoy furigana everywhere, even in places that don't support ruby tags at all.
This is really nice. I'm able to read Hiragana and Katakana fully after about 4-6 weeks now but then I'm hit with the reality of how many Kanji I have to learn still everytime I want to read something in real life lol
That’s incredible. I’m always impressed with the utility of the TrueType/open font spec - the flexibility there is really an underappreciated work of engineering genius.
I mean, fonts are Turing-complete [0], so it isn’t surprising that this is possible. Turing-completeness is often by accident rather than by genius [1].
Which makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too.
Bitmap fonts aren't turing complete. The fact that TrueType is built with an arbitrary virtual machine is insane, makes implementations ridiculously complex, and is a huge security liability. The purpose of the VM wasn't to "represent human language faithfully" but to make fonts look a little better when displayed at a variety of resolutions, via hinting. Hinting doesn't necessarily require a full VM, but somebody let the engineers have a little too much fun.
Human language isn’t a formal language, so this is a category error.
In the present context, an example is that the common reading of a Kanji word isn’t always well-defined, and neither is the decomposition of a sequence of Kanji characters into words.
One small thing on the Japanese version of the page: in the "Ligatures do the work" section, 合字 itself only gets じ over 字, and 合 has no reading. It should be ごうじ. I guess 合字 isn't in the dictionary, so it falls back to single kanji, and 合 is skipped because it has several readings.
But you could set this as the default system font for Japanese and enjoy furigana everywhere, even in places that don't support ruby tags at all.
[0] https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Unintentio...
In the present context, an example is that the common reading of a Kanji word isn’t always well-defined, and neither is the decomposition of a sequence of Kanji characters into words.
Maybe it is:
With the ligatures to adApt to pronunciation of words.
confusing when you don't explain which limktations this is