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.
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).
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.
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
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.
[0] https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Unintentio...
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.
Maybe it is:
With the ligatures to adApt to pronunciation of words.
confusing when you don't explain which limktations this is