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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

#121

Post by decimalenough »

Sardtok wrote: post #95
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 suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing. Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.

Yeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.

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

#122

Post by _f9cu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #103
mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it. Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

Why is it difficult?

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

#123

Post by efilife »

Towaway69 wrote: post #47
sparqlittlestar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Because fonts are works of art and any artist deserves to be paid. 2. Because there may not be a freely licensed font with the right aesthetics 3. Especially because Japanese fonts require much more work than Latn fonts, with not some hundred glyphs (a-zA-Z0-9 and punctuation), but with thousands upon thousands of glyphs

[flagged]

> If you're going to downvote my comment, then please also point out where my thinking is off.

saying this never gets you a reply and always brings more downvotes. Tested it

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

#124

Post by irusensei »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't be irrational. We all can make fun at clueless suits desperately throwing money at the AI buzzword furnace while still recognizing there are practical applications for it.

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

#125

Post by kouteiheika »

decimalenough wrote: post #119
kouteiheika wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Fully algorithmically? I have no idea, as I'm not really in the fonts business.

But I'm pretty sure they're not actually redrawing every character from scratch, and are actually reusing the subcomponents (at very least for normal fonts). But how much of that is actually automated - you'd have to ask actual font designers.

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

#126

Post by mattkevan »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #103
mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it. Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.

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

#127

Post by charcircuit »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #107
akdor1154 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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 affect…

>There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4

The fact that it was the only one that properly rendered for me is an actual reason.

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

#128

Post by halapro »

venturecruelty wrote: post #27
halapro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the output of LLMs lately? It's not perfect, but I bet that with enough refinements they can create "art" just as well.

What a bereft way to produce beauty. "This grey slop is good enough, isn't it?" Christ, people, let's be human again.

My man, that battle is lost.

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

#129

Post by sdenton4 »

omnimus wrote: post #86
mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up. But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they wou…

Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

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

#130

Post by Ekaros »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #103
mattkevan wrote: post #58

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now. Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’…

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it. Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.
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