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Hmm, interesting. About the lack of web-fonts for ideographic writing, let me ask: how do people write them with a keyboard? Don’t they use some sort of multipl

by eecc 9y ago

Hmm, interesting. About the lack of web-fonts for ideographic writing, let me ask: how do people write them with a keyboard? Don’t they use some sort of multiple key encoding, a sort of predictive writing, to navigate the code space and select a particular symbol? Well, at every waypoint the font can add a single fragment to the ideograph so it just needs to encode these as the font glyph? I guess it can’t be too many right?

uryga 9y ago
I think the Japanese font used on Android might be doing something like this! Look at this screenshot: https://ibb.co/hUAgWw https://ibb.co/hUAgWw Upper line - complex kanji, Lower line - its components. When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated. (It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each character that are reused)
- eecc 9y ago
  Oh I don't know much about ideographic writing, but I wonder if one can describe the language as a big search tree where the leaf ideograph is the overlay of all intermediate nodes (say each node being a vector representation.)
Pete_D 9y ago
There was an article posted here recently that discussed Chinese font design: https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/ https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fasci... It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right: > For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size). As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).

by eecc 9y ago

uryga 9y ago

I think the Japanese font used on Android might be doing something like this! Look at this screenshot: https://ibb.co/hUAgWw https://ibb.co/hUAgWw Upper line - complex kanji, Lower line - its components. When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated. (It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each character that are reused)

eecc 9y ago
Oh I don't know much about ideographic writing, but I wonder if one can describe the language as a big search tree where the leaf ideograph is the overlay of all intermediate nodes (say each node being a vector representation.)

Pete_D 9y ago

There was an article posted here recently that discussed Chinese font design: https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/ https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fasci... It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right: > For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size). As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).