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Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

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Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#111

Post by anthk »

cyphar wrote: post #22
Aachen wrote: post #6

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…

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

Most typefaces would cover a basic Sans (Helvetica/Liberation Sans) and a Serif font enough for the game to be playable.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#112

Post by djmips »

eloisant wrote: post #104
cbolton wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they pay someone to make a very similar looking font? Font design is not protected by copyright, and most fonts are also not protected by design patents as far as I know.

Because there are more than 2000 characters in Japanese, making a font is a huge work.

Can it be done for $20,000? Or if that's too low then multiple game studios should team up.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#113

Post by RobotToaster »

xigoi wrote: post #85
jacobn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The fonts seem to have little Unicode coverage (no Greek letters for example), which is one thing that I wouldn’t expect an AI to have a problem with.

Given that Chinese/Japanese characters are made from a limited number of strokes, generating them seems like an ideal application for AI.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#114

Post by dryark »

The Monotype pricing change is brutal, but there’s a workaround. Derive new Japanese font families directly from public-domain sources.

I’ve been working on doing exactly that. Reconstructing clean vector glyphs from old metal-type Japanese books. The quality of those prints is surprisingly high, and they include thousands of kanji in consistent style. With some new technological innovations and a reasonable amount of hard work, you can produce a completely new, fully legal font family without touching any commercial IP.

The method I've devised is proprietary, but I’ll say this: it’s absolutely possible, and the output rivals modern JP fonts.

Given the sudden jump from ~$300/year to ~$20k/year for some devs, I expect more people to go down the “rebuild from PD artifacts” route instead of staying locked to a monopoly.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#115

Post by thaumasiotes »

School-Cotton wrote: post #64
jacobn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#116

Post by numpad0 »

akdor1154 wrote: post #49
Aachen wrote: post #6

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…

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,…

IMO: quality wise, FOSS fonts are fine(n=1) - it doesn't have to be a proprietary font but do have to be the right ones of CJK.

- In cases with the Noto project, they've given up long ago on literal singular font in both name and file to cover every languages; they have bunch of variants as different fonts(TC,SC,HK,JP,KR,...), available as both individual files as well as combined files[1].

- In cases with most Latin fonts like Deja Vu - I think this is where bulk of "wrong font" problem comes from. They don't support CJK at all, and operating systems often handle fallback to system defaults for missing characters, but sometimes OS falls back into wrong CJK fonts and cause text mIshmashlnG[2] problems or show bunch of square placeholders(aka tofu). The latter is usually solved by installing Noto fonts, and former by specifying what fonts are to be used for fallbacks(anyhow it's done, it can be OS or game engine dependent).

- There are also bunch of domestically made fonts such as IPA Gothic; they usually only support the targeted one of CJK + ASCII(+ISO-8859-1). Most Japanese-English _bi_ lingual contents take this route, which had lead to curiosity by some as to why Japanese content creators appear to have unique and specific taste for fonts[3] - in fact they're just reusing the font files already in the project folder.

- For creative purposes such as games, FOSS fonts sometimes don't cut it, but that is not unique to the Japanese language.

1: https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/s/satob/20231... | https://archive.is/6qeVm

2: https://blog.enjo.life/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/fonts-and-... | https://archive.is/jSQzn

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwSydGAJsk

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#117

Post by atomicfiredoll »

junon wrote: post #74
exmadscientist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!".

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 al…

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)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#118

Post by kouteiheika »

michaelt wrote: post #77
mchusma wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part. I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.

When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81. That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.

On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:

    徧  ⿰彳扁
The '徧' is composed of '彳' and '扁' arranged in a horizontal pattern. Unicode even has special characters (⿰,⿱,⿶, etc.) to describe these relationships.

So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#119

Post by decimalenough »

kouteiheika wrote: post #118
michaelt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81. That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle. The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else. On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subc…

Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#120

Post by lunar_rover »

martijnvds wrote: post #46
Aeolun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Minecraft ships it I think?

Even in Minecraft it looks bad. Some CJK characters are Serif for some reason.
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