4 ms·
This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take
by uniqueid 6y ago
This is because each font requires thousands of
characters to be individually designed which is
prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and
would take longer to download.
Presumably a coherent hand-designed Japanese font
reuses the same style strokes in different combinations.
Are there tools to reduce the full set of glyphs to a
subset of component elements?
- GloriousKoji 6y agoEven if you don't go down to the individual stroke level you can break kanji up into a set of radicals. If you mix that up with the katakana, hiragana, roman letters, and punctuation it's maybe something like 500 characters. Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further.
- innocenat 6y ago> Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further. Most of the time these symbols and emoji are using fallback font though. It's not included in every font.
- sirn 6y agoNot really a tool per-se, Japanese has standardized subset of kanji suitable for computer use. This is the JIS X 0208 (Kanji 1 and Kanji 2 containing 6,879 characters) and JIS X 0213 (Kanji 3 and Kanji 4 containing 11,233 characters). There are several tricks font designer can utilizes, such as reusing radicals (component of a kanji) and combine them. This technique only works for certain type of fonts and still requires hand-tuning.
- lmm 6y agoThere are starting to be tools aimed at generating a font file from a more compact representation that would let you e.g. reuse radicals between characters, but the font file formats are pretty wedded to each glyph's entry being independent AIUI.