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Furifont, a Japanese font that shows furigana

104 points plaguna 2 days ago 20 comments

shun_dev 16 hours ago | parent

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.

jbm 1 hour ago | parent

This is an interesting use of ligatures for sure. However, I really don't know when one would use it. Couldn't you just use Ruby tags for a website?

guipsp 1 hour ago | parent

Why do something manually when it can be done automatically?

yorwba 1 hour ago | parent

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.

notorandit 1 hour ago | parent

> With the ligatures to adopt to pronunciation of words.

Maybe it is:

With the ligatures to adApt to pronunciation of words.

alasano 1 hour ago | parent

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

roughly 1 hour ago | parent

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.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

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].

[0] https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Unintentio...

roughly 42 minutes ago | parent

Which makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too.

layer8 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

roughly 11 minutes ago | parent

It's often used as one, though.

jwolfe 1 hour ago | parent

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).

ramon156 1 hour ago | parent

> javascript is required ... due to browser limitations

confusing when you don't explain which limktations this is

zerozerotwo 27 minutes ago | parent

This could be really useful as a decoding tool when you don’t know the kanji

teshigahara 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

krackers 8 minutes ago | parent

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/

igor_nast 13 minutes ago | parent

This is cool!