Fonts are throwing me off!

It’s like a vision diagnostic for kanji.

Eye doctor: And the last line plese
Patient: [struggles through it]
Eye doctor: Mmm, I’m afraid your Crabigator Cultist, Here is a prescription for blue light filter lenses, try not to spend all night doing reviews…

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Century Gothic seems to be a “kinda”. As in, it might work, but you’d better have a backup.

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It’s a non-free font, so open source OS (Linux distributions, FreeBSD and the like) won’t have it by default. You can always find ways to get a version of it for “free”, though.

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Comic Sans is the work of the devil.

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It’s not that bad! I don’t like how it’s always 1.5 times bigger than I expect at any given font size though.

OT: What are you guys favorite Japanese font? I always try to use Meiryo if I can. (MS did such a great job on this one). If it’s not available, I like to try the Google Noto font. Used to be I liked the M+ fonts, but I haven’t used those in a while.

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I especially dislike how different fonts mess up WK radicals sometimes. For example, some fonts show 船 as “sail + table + mouth”, while others - as “sail + fins + mouth”…

P. S.

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“Fins” with the hat is what Koichi used to call “volcano”, but doesn’t seem to any more. Or at least, not that I can find. Either way, they’re the same radical.

“Table” is quite different - the sides meet the top at right angles.

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Yes, but different fonts still mix them up:
image

image

image

P. S. Sorry one of the images (the one in the middle) isn’t big enough, but I think it’s still easy to see that it’s the table there.
In other words:
first image - ship with fins/volcano radical used.
second image (small, sorry again about it) - ship with table radical used
third image - table radical for reference.

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Actually it is just the way the “fins” (I prefer to think of it as “eight”) is written… you get used to it with practice. It’s the same when sometimes r + n looks like m when you see it written in English, even in standard fonts. My street name ends in rn and I often get mail where it is written ending in m!

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Yes, but it’s still a bit annoying, isn’t it? :sweat_smile:

Oh for sure! And I really do feel for the beginners when even the kana is confusing as heck!

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Also, on a related subject:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/complaining-is-a-must/10346/7249?u=trunklayer

Now I understand why I get spam from “pom” sites.

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:rofl: Just read this aloud to my husband, who cracked up completely.

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Meiryo life.

Meiryo all day every day.

I would sleep in Meiryo if I could.

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So many digital books I read have errors due to OCR mistakes.
Happens realllly often with rn.

I just finished a book set in Berlin and all the street names referenced in it came out as Karl-Marx-Alice, Stalin Alice etc

image and image are supposed to be the same kanji…

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They are the same kanji, can’t you tell? :stuck_out_tongue:

But in all seriousness, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of kanji which have that exact change, like 冷, for example. There’s a whole bunch more with more subtle tweaks, like 人 and 入 (the strokes meet at the middle rather than at the top), 長 (the left hand “foot” is lacking the serif that sticks out to the left - it’s just one angled stroke), 糸 (both sticking-out-to-the-left serifs are missing - it’s just two angled strokes), 言 (the top stroke is a dot rather than a line). And so on and so forth.

Jisho’s “how to write” animations and stroke order charts show the handwritten versions.

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When I was first learning kanji, trying to find stuff in a dictionary based on radical and stroke count, these changes gave me a super hard time.

Like, the thread radical you mentioned, in a normal ‘serif’ font, you’d need 8 strokes to write it with all the little serifs. But it’s actually only 6. So, thread is under 6 strokes, not 8.

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