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TazeTSchnitzel • today at 7:39 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I think this is a rare “useful” abuse of font ligatures, and in that respect I think this is a cool project, but it's also a terrible idea that nobody should actually use, because Japanese kanji readings are famously ambiguous and context-dependent. The modal character has two different readings without counting those used in personal names, nor contextual slight changes to pronunciation. Some characters have six different readings, and that's again without counting those used in personal names. There's no way a font can do a good job at it unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.

For context, it's a hard enough problem that Google Translate's own romanised pronunciation guides are frequently wrong, or disagree with their text-to-speech.


Replies

michaelmior • today at 8:25 PM

> unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time ;)

https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/

Armecera • today at 7:48 PM

Yeah, I already see a few mistakes just looking at this page. But I guess still useful?

silvertab • today at 8:51 PM

> but it's also a terrible idea that nobody should actually use, because Japanese kanji readings are famously ambiguous and context-dependent

Seems a bit drastic. Don't use it as the main font in a japanese textbook, sure, but use it with the disclaimer that it's not perfect and will get some readings wrong? Why not, still pretty useful. Should people also not use Google Translate? (also, you can stuff an entire llm in a font, it's been done).

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