#and glyph substitution. i've been thinking abt that ever since i noticed incorrect readings w/my bopomofo font | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rubberbandballqueen · 22 days ago

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it's unlikely to happen due to globalization, but i think it would be really funny if countries that use the latin alphabet in their writing systems started developing their own slightly different standards of writing each glyph and got obsessively picky about it.

like yeah i know there's like british vs. american standard spelling nitpicks, and that's something, but i'm thinking something more along the lines of "you put a slash through your 7's? that's the british standard but all right i guess" kind of subtle. we need to replicate what taiwan/hong kong/japan (and to an extent mainland china) have going on.

#we're talking about like incredible levels of subtle. imagine knowing where someone came from #based off whether their 2's were formed w/a loop a squiggle or just a line on the bottom #and having that reflected in the standard fonts made in each country #i got i think a jp font with enough traditional cn chars in it that it can apparently be used as a cn font #and then today when i was looking into the group that made the font Very Similar But Not Identical to the tw road sign font #again (since they maintain tw and jp variants of each of their fonts) i found that they had a project #to alter that font (named 'klee') to match taiwanese standards of writing the characters #and on one hand yeah i can see why they'd do that #it feels kind of like if it was standard for some english fonts to have ligatures connecting letters in a cursive-y way #i can see how that would bug the shit out of some people because it just Doesn't Cohere Stylistically #on the other hand. it's kind of like knowing someone's british by the way they spell it 'colour'#like although the common person will most likely notice it i don't think they're going to care all that much. y'know #the worm speaks #anyway i'm glad these taiwanese font foundries are taking advantage of new font technologies like stylistic sets #and glyph substitution. i've been thinking abt that ever since i noticed incorrect readings w/my bopomofo font #and fortunately. there is someone out there working on that. godspeed soldier

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