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…
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.
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.
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”…
“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.
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.
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!
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.
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.