Japanese Language

Anonymous

1:09 AM

Oh, whenever Japanese.SE finally graduates, we should get them to pick IPA fonts for chat!

Anonymous

I mean, fonts with good IPA support.

Anonymous

I'm guessing that'll be a while ;-)

Anonymous

But we're in the queue!

Anonymous

Current list in the queue is: Salesforce, Expression Engine, Anime, Computer Science, Japanese, Cryptography, Movies, Blender, and English Language Learners. — Grace Note ♦ Aug 6 at 0:13

Anonymous

It's a very slow-moving queue, though :-)

Darius Jahandarie

2:02 AM

Wow, Salesforce has its own SE?

Anonymous

2:33 AM

Yes! And it recently graduated

Anonymous

I'm not really familiar with Salesforce, but...

Darius Jahandarie

I can't seem to figure out how in the world that list was created just by looking through area51.stackexchange.com/?tab=beta

There are some sites with better statistics in every regard and have been around longer than everything in that list which aren't even on it.

Like Code Review.

Anonymous

3:52 AM

It's a mystery to me.

Anonymous

But I can tell you that the statistics they put on Area 51 aren't necessarily the main thing they look at

Anonymous

4:13 AM

bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/yoronchousa/h25/pdf/…

cypher

8:42 AM

uh-oh!

For the most part it seems to work well, but I'm coming across a notable number of different exceptions I'm having trouble working around for the javascript IPA thingy

Like for example istrasci's answer at japanese.stackexchange.com/a/13700/796 has "[don't you / not]" and "[with]" with square brackets, and there's no real way in those sorts of cases to figure out whether the author originally intended IPA or not

I'm thinking that might be the tip of the iceberg, so I might make it [[...]] and //...// just to be on the safe side for now

cypher

11:49 AM

actually...alternatively maybe it'd be an option to use IPA fonts with [...] /.../ if the text inside contains characters outside Basic Latin or something, and [[...]] //...// as a disambiguation syntax when all else fails

Anonymous

Making people double them will probably result in fewer surprises down the road

cypher

true...

Anonymous

Though

Anonymous

There are IPA specific characters

Anonymous

You could probably key off those :-)

cypher

11:58 AM

yeah, some existing posts which use IPA might have IPA-specific chars in some, and just Basic Latin in others, so it might make fonts a bit inconsistent, but it'd work up to a point

Anonymous

My inclination is still just to make people double it

Anonymous

We probably don't have many old posts that hit this issue

cypher

I think I agree...the approach I was trying was basically "start broad and remove as many false positives as possible", but you can never be sure you've got all of them

cypher

1:50 PM

yay! looks like the Furigana engine's been updated on the site

let me know if there are any issues

jkerian

grumbles about kids these days

Anonymous

2:52 PM

@cypher Thank you!! :-) I edited my answer and now it looks good! I updated some things on meta

Anonymous

3:13 PM

@snailboat could you point out the problem more explicitly? I'm sorry to be tedious, but I don't know enough about written Japanese to identify the problem. — Ben Collins ♦ yesterday

Anonymous

3:33 PM

I haven't responded to that yet

Anonymous

3:56 PM

3

A: How should I format my questions on Japanese Language SE?

Questions in Japanese Questions can be in all-Japanese or all-English, or a mixture of both If you have sufficient ability with Japanese to ask a question entirely in the language, feel free to do so. If you are able, an English translation would also be helpful to less advanced users of the si...

Darius Jahandarie

5:20 PM

Serifs... :(

And all of a sudden, antialiasing has disappeared on Japanese text

It gets anti-aliased again if I removed "Kochi Gothic" from the .ja-text font list:

Looks awful when the text is bolded especially. And italicized Japanese doesn't show at all with it:

And again, works fine with Kochi Gothic removed:

Anonymous

5:35 PM

Oh, no!

Anonymous

I get AA on my computer and phone both

Anonymous

It's okay on my Windows box

Anonymous

Kochi Gothic, huh?

Darius Jahandarie

I guess the Japanese font change is due to the furigana update, while the IPA font change is due to the new IPA stuff.

Maybe I will just highlight @cypher and leave it at that.

Anonymous

@DariusJahandarie That does look bad

Anonymous

5:41 PM

@DariusJahandarie Although I think this is actually easier to read :-)

Anonymous

@DariusJahandarie Italicized furigana is a new feature! I hope we never use it ever

Anonymous

Although happily it renders fine on my system

Anonymous

In general I don't like putting Japanese in italics

Anonymous

Here, this is scaled small enough that AA turns off (but not for italics, for whatever reason):

Anonymous

5:43 PM

Italics :-(

Darius Jahandarie

I think Kochi Gothic has bitmaps in it while other fonts don't.

Anonymous

If you zoom in enough, does AA turn on?

Anonymous

Kochi Gothic is TrueType

Darius Jahandarie

Yes.

Anonymous

Hmm, I wonder what I have the threshold set to for AA

Anonymous

5:46 PM

Anonymous

The italics still look all ugly :-(

Anonymous

The others are okay, maybe not ideal but fine

Anonymous

Hmmph, Kochi Gothic renders fine for me at those sizes

Anonymous

Oh well, I'll leave it be

cypher

6:17 PM

T_T

@DariusJahandarie @snailboat which fonts do you normally use for Japanese?

I think I should put Sazanami Gothic and Kochi Gothic towards the end of the list

I originally put those after IPAGothic because of this, but I guess I underestimated how many people have IPAGothic installed

Darius Jahandarie

I honestly don't know too much about Japanese fonts.

cypher

as an alternative, I could just remove the font names entirely and leave only the xml:lang="ja" tags and let the OS decide

Anonymous

@cypher I actually like Sazanami Gothic :-)

Anonymous

I didn't realize we were changing the font ordering, though

cypher

oh, is that different to Kochi?

before Japanese fonts weren't specified at all, so it left it up to the OS

Anonymous

6:28 PM

I'm not sure. It looks like it might be an alias

Anonymous

I'm not sure. I only just installed Kochi Gothic, and I already had Sazanami Gothic. Let me compare them

Anonymous

> Upstream development of the kochi fonts has been discontinued. The author of this font suggests as a replacement the use of the kochi-based "sazanami" font. So if you want to usea font like this one, consider using "ttf-sazanami-gothic", instead.

Anonymous

So I guess they aren't actually the same thing

cypher

no, I thought they were very similar though (aside from minor differences)

I originally specified the fonts to try to fix meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1141, but looks like it's causing more problems than I'd envisaged...

Anonymous

Ahh, I see

cypher

6:32 PM

I might try installing all Japanese fonts from Synaptic and see if there are better alternatives

Darius Jahandarie

I was about to say "It's possible that setups vary so wildly it might just make sense to have a dropdown in the furigana settings box", but then I looked and there IS such a dropdown in the furigana settings box!

Anonymous

Oh, fun!

Anonymous

And here I was doing it the hard way :-)

Darius Jahandarie

Switching to VL Gothic has restored my anti-aliasing. Nothing else seems to work.

Anonymous

Hmm, I can see differences between most of these but it's too subtle for me to be able to really describe, besides seeing the spacing changes etc.

Anonymous

6:42 PM

@cypher Maybe you could leave it at (automatic) by default and allow people to choose different fonts if they have problems

Anonymous

Is that how it was before? (I don't remember seeing the drop-down before)

cypher

yeah, that's what I was wondering

Anonymous

I like being able to use my system default font easily, which was うずらフォント for quite a while :-) Although I change it now and then. I'm using Sazanami Gothic right now!

cypher

I think I'd need to specify the IPA fonts though (as lang="" won't work), so should probably move the serif fonts to the back of the list

Anonymous

Oh, I see

Anonymous

6:44 PM

I really wish the term "IPA" meant the same thing all the time

Anonymous

It's confusing to me that sometimes it's Japan's Information-technology Promotion Agency, and sometimes it's International Phonetic Alphabet

Anonymous

So we have IPA fonts like Doulos SIL and um, IPA fonts like IPA Gothic...

Darius Jahandarie

Hehe

Anonymous

I've read a lot of times that Japanese typography just doesn't have italics

Anonymous

And I've never seen them in books that I can recall

Anonymous

6:52 PM

But I see them sometimes in subtitles

Anonymous

I can't remember where else I've seen them―posters?

Anonymous

I guess typography people would call them oblique instead of italic

Anonymous

I wish we could have underlining instead of italics for Japanese. I wonder if we can do emphasis dots with the furigana script

Anonymous

Ooh, we can! [テ]{﹅}[ス]{﹅}[ト]{﹅}

Anonymous

[テスト]{﹅・﹅・﹅}

Anonymous

6:57 PM

Though I suppose that would look confusing on the mobile site

cypher

can't seem to find sazanami on Synaptic

Anonymous

packages.qa.debian.org/t/ttf-sazanami/news/…

Anonymous

Oh well, I'm keeping it! ;-)

Anonymous

ttf-kochi-gothic says: Both this package and its alternative sazanami font are legacy and deprecated. You are recommended to transition to other modern font packages such as "fonts-vlgothic" or "fonts-ipafont-gothic".

Anonymous

> VL Gothic is beautiful Japanese free Gothic TrueType font, developed by Project Vine.
>
> It is based on Sazanami Gothic (by Electronic Font Open Laboratory) and M+1C/M+1M font (by M+ FONTS PROJECT).

Anonymous

7:05 PM

I guess the lineage of that font is Kochi → Sazanami → VL Gothic

Anonymous

They disabled the embedded bitmaps in VL Gothic

Anonymous

7:23 PM

Wow, VL Gothic is weird.

Anonymous

That's VL Gothic on top

Anonymous

Doesn't that look weird? :-)

cypher

for the ipa (phonetic alphabet) fonts:

Serif: Chrysanthi Unicode, Doulos SIL, Gentium, GentiumAlt, Code2000, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Bitstream Cyberbit

Sans-serif: DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro

Darius Jahandarie

@snailboat I'm used to the top version :-)

Anonymous

7:30 PM

The three fonts up there are VL Gothic, Sazanami Gothic, and IPA Gothic

Anonymous

@DariusJahandarie It doesn't look like a normal font to me

cypher

I don't know whether there's any other fonts to add, or which order to use exactly

Anonymous

@cypher I don't know either, but SIL fonts come recommended for IPA if they happen to be installed

Anonymous

I see both Doulos and Gentium

Anonymous

Mar 2 at 2:36, by Dono

Doulos and Gentium come to mind.

Anonymous

7:31 PM

Hehe!

Anonymous

scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/…

Anonymous

It looks like Charis SIL and Doulos SIL are listed under "IPA"

cypher

yeah, those are both Serifs though, do we want to change to use sans-serif or leave it as Wikipedia had it with mainly serifs first or something?

those SIL fonts are currently #2 and #3 respectively

Anonymous

scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Andika

Anonymous

Andika is a sans serif alternative but I don't know how many people have it installed

cypher

7:37 PM

I think serifs do look a bit out of place on JLSE, so maybe list them after sans-serifs?

Anonymous

I have no opinion about serifs

Anonymous

I think IPA Gothic is probably the best choice for a general, freely available Gothic font for Japanese

cypher

I was planning to remove specific Japanese fonts and let the OS decide and allow people to choose in the options, but I don't know

Anonymous

Oh, that works

cypher

I was mainly talking about the IPA (phonetic fonts)

Anonymous

7:43 PM

Yes, sorry, I was changing the subject sort of :-)

Anonymous

I don't have much to add about either topic now, I think

cypher

fair enough :)

I'm always a bit hesitant to make decisions without consultation with the Furigana engine, because it can make large changes to the site

maybe I can add a "prefer serifs/sans serifs for IPA" option, and leave it like Wikipedia by default

Darius Jahandarie

7:58 PM

I don't really mind the serifs that much if there's no good solution to get sans serif IPA.

Anonymous

@DariusJahandarie Make everyone install Andika!

Anonymous

If everyone thinks sans serif is preferable, we could just list Andika first and it'll work for anyone who has it installed

cypher

I guess web fonts are an option, but IE sometimes pops up with security warnings I believe

Anonymous

I'm not familiar with Chrysanthi Unicode

cypher

neither am I

Anonymous

8:01 PM

Hmm, but Japanese fonts are pretty heavy

cypher

for phonetic fonts I mean :)

Anonymous

Oh, right. Ummm

Anonymous

How big are those? :-)

Anonymous

Chrysanthi Unicode Regular is a serif font. It also looks kind of ugly

Anonymous

fontfox.com/font-viewer.php?font=ChrysanthiUnicodeRegular

cypher

8:03 PM

ok, I'll put it at the back of the list

Anonymous

The SIL fonts say they can be redistributed freely: "The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot be released under any other type of license."

Anonymous

But Andika is 1,466,764 bytes

Anonymous

Half a meg gzipped

cypher

yeah, might not be an option

Anonymous

(Has HTTP compression moved on from gzip yet?)

cypher

8:08 PM

I think I might make the phonetic fonts preference Andika, Doulos SIL, Gentium, GentiumAlt, DejaVu Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Bitstream Cyberbit, Arial Unicode MS, Lucida Sans Unicode, Code2000, Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, Matrix Unicode, Chrysanthi Unicode

Anonymous

That's looking reasonable

cypher

OK might do that. Thank you as always for your input snailboat!

Anonymous

:-)

Anonymous

Thanks for doing all the furigana script stuff!

cypher

9:00 PM

no worries :) I've asked Oded to update the script with the font changes

Anonymous

9:24 PM

7

A: Is this sentence in a different language or is it just gibberish?

It's Korean: 　ヨボセヨ　　　여보세요　　yeoboseyo　　'Hello' (polite) 　ペゴパヨ　　　배고파요　　baegopayo　　'[I'm] hungry' (polite) 　チキン　　　　치킨　　　　chikin　　　'chicken' 　ピリョヘヨ　　필요해요　　piryohaeyo　　'[I] need' (polite) The third column is Revised Romanization. The glosses on the right aren't supposed to be a perfect tr...

Anonymous

I can make the chart line up now!

cypher

11:25 PM

@snailboat hmmm, I don't know what I can do about this, aside from specify the fonts in <pre> tags...meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1023 goes out of alignment if you leave it up to the OS and use lang="ja" for me

I might apply the Japanese CSS for fonts only for <pre> and let the OS do the rest

I might need to remove my message to Oded and fix this when I have time tomorrow

Anonymous

11:45 PM

@cypher Oh, doesn't the chart line up for you?

Anonymous

I thought it was all fixed!

Anonymous

Like, in the answer I linked to up there?

Anonymous

And the table in my meta question looks fine now, too!

cypher

yes, it does currently...but if you remove the specific fonts and let the OS decide like I was planning it stops working for me, so I don't think i should update until I find a fix

Anonymous

@cypher Ohh, I see

Anonymous

11:47 PM

@cypher Yes, I thought that was the plan: specify fonts for <pre>

Anonymous

To fix tables

Anonymous

Is there a problem with doing that?

cypher

I was intending to make all Japanese text use a Japanese font, but there were mainly problems with Kochi Gothic I think...I think I should maybe explicitly specify Japanese fonts for <pre> and not other Japanese text, and remove Kochi Gothic (and maybe Sazanami as well(?)) from the list

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