Comment by kouteiheika
Comment by kouteiheika 2 hours ago
> I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.
The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.
On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:
徧 ⿰彳扁
So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.
Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.