6 ms·

Are there no fonts that are open for anyone to use, like what does a Linux distribution ship? Surely those can render Japanese characters? Maybe it's because i

by Aachen 11mo ago

Are there no fonts that are open for anyone to use, like what does a Linux distribution ship? Surely those can render Japanese characters? Maybe it's because it's a dumb question but the article doesn't really set the stage for me why it's an issue that 1 font licensing company raised its prices. I guess they must have a monopoly or else this change isn't commercially viable (the article just says "one of the country's leading font licensing services"), but even then, there ought to be open options

Aeolun 11mo ago
There’s the unifont, but it’s not really something you’d want to ship in a game. The main focus is apparently on making sure every character is covered, not that it looks nice.
- martijnvds 11mo ago
  Minecraft ships it I think?
  - Aachen 11mo ago
    Minecraft as an example of desirable graphic properties :D It sure has its style and I stand by what I've always maintained about gameplay being infinitely more important than polished graphics, but that does sound ironic to my ears!
  - lunar_rover 11mo ago
    Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.
teraflop 11mo ago
When you're making a work of art (such as a game) you don't just want any old font, you want one that serves a particular aesthetic purpose. If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable. In particular, game UI tends to be designed around the particular dimensions (metrics) of a font's characters. So a string of text whose size is "just right" in one font might look too big or too small in another, even at the same nominal font size. And this can affect many different pieces of text throughout a game.
- jjmarr 11mo ago
  Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.
  - exmadscientist 11mo ago
    I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever. Arial is popular because people see it and say "good enough!".
    - sexeriy237 11mo ago
      its the default
    - junon 11mo ago
      Here's my anecdotal, completely unfounded theory. Serif fonts were used in print media for ages but when computers came around sans serif became significantly more popular as no longer was there the legibility concern with dodgy pigment applicators etc. People started to switch to sans serif fonts more and more and would seek out an alternative to the widely defaulted Times New Roman in early days. They'd open the alphebetically sorted fonts list and what did they see at the top? Arial. Keep in mind, when personal computing started out, we didn't have a ton of fonts packaged with the system to start with. Just a handful. Arial has pretty much always been there.
      - atomicfiredoll 11mo ago
        The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was. But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles. Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply. That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
conradev 11mo ago
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation,_reorganization,_and_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation... Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan. https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-plans-to-join-monotype https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-pla...
- michaelbuck 11mo ago
  Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/monotype_just_hit_us_with_a_30000yr_font_license/ https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...
  - yuriks 11mo ago
    And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.
    - sneak 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - otikik 11mo ago
        The commons. They profit by making everyone else worse off. We should have a specific name for that sort of economical behavior. “Leeches”?
      - inglor_cz 11mo ago
        It is a nasty aftereffect of the copyright law expanding like cancer. I would gladly go back to the older 14+14 system, even though I have nontrivial income from royalties. In my opinion, copyright should motivate people to create new things, not one cash cow that they then will milk for eternity.
  - 11mo ago
omoikane 11mo ago
I know Noto Sans can render just about everything, and has a permissive license: https://fonts.google.com/noto https://fonts.google.com/noto I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.
- forgotoldacc 11mo ago
  A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.
- vee-kay 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
    AI sludge
    - vee-kay 11mo ago
      Relevant info, that's all, in this context. Source is AI, yes.
  - DaSHacka 11mo ago
    do not speak unless spoken to, clanker If any of us wanted to hear what ChatGPT had to say, we would have prompted it ourselves.
    - vee-kay 11mo ago
      Hmmm.. You speak as if you control the internet in general, and HN in particular. But thankfully, you do not. I shared the info (yes, it is from AI, but the source does not matter really (AI LLMs themselves source such info from public domain sources, I could have simply refered to them and got similar info), the intent does), so that anyone else wondering about this thread context (like I was) can become aware of this bit of info. And hey, what you do or do not do with ChatGPT, is upto you and it, clanking or otherwise.
cyphar 11mo ago
There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]). But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse. [1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
- asimovDev 11mo ago
  I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts. Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.
  - anal_reactor 11mo ago
    I remember that PES6 was the only PES to get Polish translation. The start screen wouldn't render correctly because the font was missing the glyph Ś.
  - SSLy 11mo ago
    it's because whatever font stack to directx renderer middleware game engines were using was usually only developed for the latin script, probably the lowest common denominator of no diacritics either.
  - eloisant 11mo ago
    It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts. Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs
riedel 11mo ago
The license before was attractive before. I guess they will be switching. Maybe also to free fonts. From the article: >UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. It is that existing annually paid licences are converted. The extra work for existing titles is the problem. And: > The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.
schainks 11mo ago
You can't just "swap a font out" without redoing all the work. Type layout in Japanese in particular has a system of layered, complex rules that include rules that define how to combine Western glyphs with Japanese glyphs and produce visually harmonic work. Swapping a font out due to a cost issue is not workable. Also, not all pan-asian fonts contain all the glyphs you need to render all the characters you want. A CJK font has tens of thousands of characters, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of these video games will use fonts with particular glyphs that are not always included in other fonts. Monotype is giving these customers the finger while also ramming a bulldozer in their asses with this change. It's completely unacceptable, painfully rude, and ridiculously tone deaf. In fairness, this is totally on brand for Monotype.
akdor1154 11mo ago
Interested in tangent replies to this, even if such fonts are artistically unsuitable for games - are open source fonts OK for Japanese? I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both. How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?
- yorwba 11mo ago
  Noto Sans comes in SC, TC, HK, CJK JP and CJK KR variants. There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters, nor does Deja Vu support them.
  - amake 11mo ago
    > There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters Yes there is: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP
- CorrectHorseBat 11mo ago
  Every variant is a different font. IMO Han unification is one of the greatest failures of Unicode.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  > I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both. This is "Han Unification", a terrible idea from early in the development of Unicode. The idea was so bad that the affected glyphs are now also given always-Chinese and always-Japanese Unicode points, making it possible to, for example, compare a Chinese character to a Japanese character in the same document. But the fix exists. You can specify that you have no idea what you're trying to write by coding it as U+76F4 (直). Or you can specify a Chinese character by coding U+FAA8 (直). Or you can specify a Japanese one by coding U+2F940 (直). There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 - it's just a dead, useless unicode point - but we can observe here that my default font doesn't include a glyph for either U+FAA8 or U+2F940 even though U+FAA8 is by definition identical to U+76FA (since this is a Chinese font).
magios 11mo ago
unifont has cjk support, bitmap fonts work just fine for the integer domain. been using unifont system and app wide for some integer number of years now. i believe the only app that i use that does not have unifont is the game rimworld, but i haven't investigated to see if there's any fix for that. for qt based apps i believe you have to use the environmental variable QT_FONT_DPI=128 or something similar, where the 128 is double the DPI, which may be some bug that i got around that may be fixed now

by Aachen 11mo ago

Aeolun 11mo ago

There’s the unifont, but it’s not really something you’d want to ship in a game. The main focus is apparently on making sure every character is covered, not that it looks nice.

martijnvds 11mo ago
Minecraft ships it I think?
- Aachen 11mo ago
  Minecraft as an example of desirable graphic properties :D It sure has its style and I stand by what I've always maintained about gameplay being infinitely more important than polished graphics, but that does sound ironic to my ears!
- lunar_rover 11mo ago
  Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.

teraflop 11mo ago

When you're making a work of art (such as a game) you don't just want any old font, you want one that serves a particular aesthetic purpose. If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable. In particular, game UI tends to be designed around the particular dimensions (metrics) of a font's characters. So a string of text whose size is "just right" in one font might look too big or too small in another, even at the same nominal font size. And this can affect many different pieces of text throughout a game.

jjmarr 11mo ago
Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.
- exmadscientist 11mo ago
  I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever. Arial is popular because people see it and say "good enough!".
  - sexeriy237 11mo ago
    its the default
  - junon 11mo ago
    Here's my anecdotal, completely unfounded theory. Serif fonts were used in print media for ages but when computers came around sans serif became significantly more popular as no longer was there the legibility concern with dodgy pigment applicators etc. People started to switch to sans serif fonts more and more and would seek out an alternative to the widely defaulted Times New Roman in early days. They'd open the alphebetically sorted fonts list and what did they see at the top? Arial. Keep in mind, when personal computing started out, we didn't have a ton of fonts packaged with the system to start with. Just a handful. Arial has pretty much always been there.
    - atomicfiredoll 11mo ago
      The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was. But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles. Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply. That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

conradev 11mo ago

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation,_reorganization,_and_expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging#Consolidation... Fontworks’ team, type inventory, IP, technology, and services will join global type specialist Monotype–Monotype’s first acquisition in Japan. https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-plans-to-join-monotype https://www.monotype.com/company/press-release/fontworks-pla...

michaelbuck 11mo ago
Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/monotype_just_hit_us_with_a_30000yr_font_license/ https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...
- yuriks 11mo ago
  And after digging through the comments... Yup it's private equity again. PE buyouts should be considered criminal fraud.
  - sneak 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - otikik 11mo ago
      The commons. They profit by making everyone else worse off. We should have a specific name for that sort of economical behavior. “Leeches”?
    - inglor_cz 11mo ago
      It is a nasty aftereffect of the copyright law expanding like cancer. I would gladly go back to the older 14+14 system, even though I have nontrivial income from royalties. In my opinion, copyright should motivate people to create new things, not one cash cow that they then will milk for eternity.
- 11mo ago

omoikane 11mo ago

I know Noto Sans can render just about everything, and has a permissive license: https://fonts.google.com/noto https://fonts.google.com/noto I am not sure if it's possible to parameterize it to have the look that game developers wanted.

forgotoldacc 11mo ago
A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.
vee-kay 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  AI sludge
  - vee-kay 11mo ago
    Relevant info, that's all, in this context. Source is AI, yes.
- DaSHacka 11mo ago
  do not speak unless spoken to, clanker If any of us wanted to hear what ChatGPT had to say, we would have prompted it ourselves.
  - vee-kay 11mo ago
    Hmmm.. You speak as if you control the internet in general, and HN in particular. But thankfully, you do not. I shared the info (yes, it is from AI, but the source does not matter really (AI LLMs themselves source such info from public domain sources, I could have simply refered to them and got similar info), the intent does), so that anyone else wondering about this thread context (like I was) can become aware of this bit of info. And hey, what you do or do not do with ChatGPT, is upto you and it, clanking or otherwise.

cyphar 11mo ago

There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]). But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse. [1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan

asimovDev 11mo ago
I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts. Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.
- anal_reactor 11mo ago
  I remember that PES6 was the only PES to get Polish translation. The start screen wouldn't render correctly because the font was missing the glyph Ś.
- SSLy 11mo ago
  it's because whatever font stack to directx renderer middleware game engines were using was usually only developed for the latin script, probably the lowest common denominator of no diacritics either.
- eloisant 11mo ago
  It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts. Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

riedel 11mo ago

The license before was attractive before. I guess they will be switching. Maybe also to free fonts. From the article: >UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. It is that existing annually paid licences are converted. The extra work for existing titles is the problem. And: > The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.

schainks 11mo ago

You can't just "swap a font out" without redoing all the work. Type layout in Japanese in particular has a system of layered, complex rules that include rules that define how to combine Western glyphs with Japanese glyphs and produce visually harmonic work. Swapping a font out due to a cost issue is not workable. Also, not all pan-asian fonts contain all the glyphs you need to render all the characters you want. A CJK font has tens of thousands of characters, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of these video games will use fonts with particular glyphs that are not always included in other fonts. Monotype is giving these customers the finger while also ramming a bulldozer in their asses with this change. It's completely unacceptable, painfully rude, and ridiculously tone deaf. In fairness, this is totally on brand for Monotype.

akdor1154 11mo ago

Interested in tangent replies to this, even if such fonts are artistically unsuitable for games - are open source fonts OK for Japanese? I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both. How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?

yorwba 11mo ago
Noto Sans comes in SC, TC, HK, CJK JP and CJK KR variants. There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters, nor does Deja Vu support them.
- amake 11mo ago
  > There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters Yes there is: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP
CorrectHorseBat 11mo ago
Every variant is a different font. IMO Han unification is one of the greatest failures of Unicode.
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
> I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both. This is "Han Unification", a terrible idea from early in the development of Unicode. The idea was so bad that the affected glyphs are now also given always-Chinese and always-Japanese Unicode points, making it possible to, for example, compare a Chinese character to a Japanese character in the same document. But the fix exists. You can specify that you have no idea what you're trying to write by coding it as U+76F4 (直). Or you can specify a Chinese character by coding U+FAA8 (直). Or you can specify a Japanese one by coding U+2F940 (直). There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 - it's just a dead, useless unicode point - but we can observe here that my default font doesn't include a glyph for either U+FAA8 or U+2F940 even though U+FAA8 is by definition identical to U+76FA (since this is a Chinese font).

magios 11mo ago

unifont has cjk support, bitmap fonts work just fine for the integer domain. been using unifont system and app wide for some integer number of years now. i believe the only app that i use that does not have unifont is the game rimworld, but i haven't investigated to see if there's any fix for that. for qt based apps i believe you have to use the environmental variable QT_FONT_DPI=128 or something similar, where the 128 is double the DPI, which may be some bug that i got around that may be fixed now