Comment by Aachen

Part of the reason Arial is so dominant is because it's proportioned the same as Helvetica, meaning it can be swapped in to avoid licensing fees without affecting document layout.

That is true for English games, but the vast majority of Japanese games use the same 3 or 4 fonts. Often they give the user the ability to change it. Or they just write menu systems in English if they want to stylise it.

If you are creating a work of art that depends on a continued business relationship with others, especially one without solid contracts that won't let them change pricing on you, then you have no one else to blame but yourself.

Sure but spacing shouldn't matter for multilingual games as you already make it dynamic for the local lang, aka why speed runners use certain locals. also some games that pack their own font let you throw a font file in the local path of the game to override the packaged font.

Why don't they pay someone to make a very similar looking font? Font design is not protected by copyright, and most fonts are also not protected by design patents as far as I know.

I grew up in russia and every localized game always had godawful ugly thin fonts. I would always watch foreign gameplay videos with jealousy cause they had beautiful latin fonts.

Now it's been years since I played a game in russian (almost a decade at this point I think) and I am so glad I don't have to put up with that anymore. Once in a while I see a screenshot from a cyrillic-using language translated game and probably half of the time the fonts are still bad.

Alternately, imagine if all text in your favorite game was IP owned by some random third party that could ruin everything one or two years down the line.

Perhaps it is time for more people to invest in royalty free IP? We are seeing a bit of a tragedy of the commons type of situation going down, right now.

Most typefaces would cover a basic Sans (Helvetica/Liberation Sans) and a Serif font enough for the game to be playable.

Additional anecdote about Monotype pricing policies:

https://old.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1jqqlm6/mon...

IMO: quality wise, FOSS fonts are fine(n=1) - it doesn't have to be a proprietary font but do have to be the right ones of CJK.

- In cases with the Noto project, they've given up long ago on literal singular font in both name and file to cover every languages; they have bunch of variants as different fonts(TC,SC,HK,JP,KR,...), available as both individual files as well as combined files[1].

- In cases with most Latin fonts like Deja Vu - I think this is where bulk of "wrong font" problem comes from. They don't support CJK at all, and operating systems often handle fallback to system defaults for missing characters, but sometimes OS falls back into wrong CJK fonts and cause text mIshmashlnG[2] problems or show bunch of square placeholders(aka tofu). The latter is usually solved by installing Noto fonts, and former by specifying what fonts are to be used for fallbacks(anyhow it's done, it can be OS or game engine dependent).

- There are also bunch of domestically made fonts such as IPA Gothic; they usually only support the targeted one of CJK + ASCII(+ISO-8859-1). Most Japanese-English _bi_ lingual contents take this route, which had lead to curiosity by some as to why Japanese content creators appear to have unique and specific taste for fonts[3] - in fact they're just reusing the font files already in the project folder.

- For creative purposes such as games, FOSS fonts sometimes don't cut it, but that is not unique to the Japanese language.

1: https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/s/satob/20231... | https://archive.is/6qeVm

2: https://blog.enjo.life/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/fonts-and-... | https://archive.is/jSQzn

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwSydGAJsk

Every variant is a different font. IMO Han unification is one of the greatest failures of Unicode.

Noto Sans comes in SC, TC, HK, CJK JP and CJK KR variants. There's no Noto Serif for CJK characters, nor does Deja Vu support them.

> 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 affected glyphs are now also given always-Chinese and always-Japanese Unicode points, making it possible to, for example, compare a Chinese character to a Japanese character in the same document.

But the fix exists. You can specify that you have no idea what you're trying to write by coding it as U+76F4 (直). Or you can specify a Chinese character by coding U+FAA8 (直). Or you can specify a Japanese one by coding U+2F940 (直). There isn't actually a reason you'd want U+76F4 - it's just a dead, useless unicode point - but we can observe here that my default font doesn't include a glyph for either U+FAA8 or U+2F940 even though U+FAA8 is by definition identical to U+76FA (since this is a Chinese font).

Minecraft ships it I think?

A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.

[flagged]