Seed. LINE's Custom Typeface | Hacker News Reader

Seed. LINE's Custom Typeface

seed.line.me

90 pointstotetsu50 comments

As someone who regularly works with Japanese and Thai, I'm very excited about this, given it has English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Traditional Chinese as its basic set. Thai itself is complex to layout[^a], and it can be very hard to find a matching typeface. I guess LINE has this problem too, given the app is popular in both Japan and Thailand.

It is, however, a bit unfortunate that this is yet another unlooped Thai typeface[1]. Loopless is impossible to read as a body text for people above thirty. Historically, IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped[2] was pretty much the only open-source stylized Thai font that is looped (not including the standard Tlwg set). I remembered that Noto Sans Thai[3] used to be looped, but they switched to a loopless version at one point. Thankfully they've (re?)introduced the looped version[4] in recent years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography#Looped_vs_loop...

[2]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped

[3]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai

[4]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped

[^a]: Since Thai text typically requires another ascent level above cap height and ascender, and another level under descender for tone markers and vowels, on iOS, if you add Thai as one of the phone languages, iOS will apply a 1.2x line height modifier to all text in the system, either by expanding line-height when allowed, or shrinking the font size.

I wish they'd put this much effort into the app itself. Line is by far the worst messaging app I've ever used (and I have no choice, but to use it). Files and photos expire and disappear, giant ads in the UI, chats that disappear, notifications and calls that fail to show up on the receiving side (happened to me both on iOS and Android), inane process of transferring chats to a new device or the chats will just disappear, PC app that logs me out every single day (somehow Telegram and Signal stay logged in just fine).

Exactly this. Instead of inventing another useless typeface noone is gonna use (I am pretty sure there are numerous typefaces exist that excel for Thai and Japanese languages) they would better work on simple case chats backup that's doesn't work if you move the app cross OS.

I also have to use LINE every day, and I can't say I love it (but it's either this or Facebook). They've been trying to push LINE Premium and LINE AI very hard (at least in Japan) to the point that some features are now blocked (e.g. you cannot unsend photos anymore unless you pay for Premium) and I absolutely hate it.

I hate the expiring photos/videos in message threads too. Overall the UX is clunky. I also use Wechat everyday, and even though their UX is also pretty clunky, it's still somehow efficient, and doesn't it bother me as much as having to use Line.

This sounds plausible. Unicode as used and implemented on modern OS has a nasty quirk that texts become patchy mix of the language in use + random Simplified Chinese equivalents(apparently the opposite still randOmly haPPEn in Simplified Chinese systems too - showing Japanese pieces out of nowhere). The official Unicode Consortium sanctioned solution to this problem is to specify and switch fonts wherever and however appropriate, even mid-sentences, which isn't a great solution, if not unreasonable for a lot of developers.

Creating language-specific fonts that can be just forced everywhere to eliminate random pieces from other languages solves this problem. At least everything will be consistent.

Not Taiwanese, but Traditional Chinese.

The most common traditional Chinese language code is zh-tw, for "Taiwan," since Taiwan is the largest country to use the traditional characters.

Oh thanks. Corrected. My brain saw TW (instead of TC) and short-circuited that as a language name for some reason!

For those who are wondering what Line is, it’s a Japanese messenger turned super-app [0]

> Line became Japan's largest social network in 2013 and is used by over 70% of the population as of 2023; it is also popular mainly in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.

The font looks decent, nice of them to have it under the SIL Open Font License.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)

It’s so interesting to see the explosive fractal of the Internet collapse back into these singularity super apps in different cultures all over the world.

Obviously many in this community see that as a generally bad thing(me included) but the wide audience of none-tech people clearly gravitate very strongly towards it.

I throw it on the pile for evidence of “meaningful friction”, a concept that someone else has definitely already coined: that “some degree of friction or restriction brings positive benefits for things like art or community compared to unlimited easy access. For example very small data limits creating unique art or music in early game bit products.”

Quick research indicates that Jerry Hirshburg has coined it Creative Abrasion and MARTIN WEIGEL has blogged about it, but neither specifically bring the idea to the concept of communities.

Yes, it's very bad. And it's not organic. People in this very thread say that they have no choice but to use LINE. I don't know how exactly it rose to prominence in Asia, but for example in Russia people are now being forced to use the state-developed MAX. You only actually force a part of society - various state clerks, military, police, educational workers, schoolchildren, students - and they, together with their relatives, are numerous enough to leave no alternative for others by making it a de facto communication platform (while other messengers are incrementally blocked and require a VPN, which is a no go for the non-tech-savvy since regular VPNs are outlawed and blocked as well, and setting up alternatives like VLESS implies buying a VPS abroad - and the payment options are virtually all gone as well).

I believe this is the result of the current world leaders' agenda to close down and isolate countries and make as much chaos as possible by stirring local nationalism, setting up nations against nations, impeding international communication, perpetrating local atrocities while the rest of the world stands aside indifferent or doesn't even know the full extent of those, etc. And this scattered world will still be owned and milked by global entities, that's where the hypocrisy is.

If anyone's been living under the rock, I recommend that they check the news - too many rabbid talking heads are in a runaway warmongering mode now and have moved the Overton window enough to say in all seriousness that war between Europe and Russia, USA and China is not just possible, but inevitable!

You went off the deep end after your first sentence. I think it's best phrased as "first in, best dressed" for that demographic era. Sure, I don't use it as my main messenger but my family, relatives, and their friends do.

Off-topic but, what has prevented "super apps" from becoming a thing in the West? Antitrust laws? Infrastructure? Or just cultural differences?

IMO the superapp notion is a bit exaggerated. Lots of the Asian superapps superfeatures are just random buttons on random places created in decisions decentralized/scope creeping/workers overqualified/anemic management workplace that launch WebViews out of nowhere. The prerequisites are nonexistent leadership and smart yet business ignorant workers.

If you fill a few urban core skyscrapers to the brim with bunch of STEM/CS/CE uni grad kids, they'll start stuffing anything they are allowed to touch with super futuristic string theory thing for absolutely no reason. Someone's going to implement crypto mining feature on the live app. Others start doing LLMs working together with image generation teams while the image creation team with a quirky boss will have their own. That's how superapp gets created.

Also, Google is an American company, unless I'm grossly mistaken. You guys have a superapp and a superapp company already.

I think it's all due to Apple:

* Apple developer program is $99/year everywhere and making iOS apps without a Mac used to be impossible and is still difficult, so naturally there's more demand for miniapp platforms like WeChat and LINE in countries with way lower purchasing parity. LINE miniapps are booming now that the yen is so weak. But the West doesn't have this issue.

* Superapps typically grow out of chat and payment platforms and Apple owns such a massive share of that in the West. They're not going to build miniapps into Apple Messages or Apple Pay.

Isn't emacs the original super-app? :>

I always wondered if mobile networks/tarriffs had a factor in it. If the super-app negotiates with the carrier to get zero-rated, it gains an immediate edge over other free-standing players.

I'm a bit envious of people who can spend so much attention, time, resources on a font that to me appears as yet another one out there. The presentation is great.

Another commentor pointed out that the problem they appear to be solving is consistent typesetting and layout across multiple east and southeast asian languages.

I've never dealt with those precisely but I have had to typeset documents containing both latin and greek or cyrillic (but luckily not all three) and even with that there are not very many fonts that support both, and even fewer that are a good font with both. You end up having to mix fonts, and finding ones that look good together with the same letter spacing and line height and consistent weight is quite a challenge!

I'm definitely aware of the trend of every tech company commissioning a near identical just-slightly-quirky sans serif font for no clear reason but this doesn't seem to be that.

The reason is to avoid having to pay royalties. Typefaces can get extremely expensive.

It wasn't obvious to me at first but it appears this was released in 2023. The last release on the repo is from October 2024.

It's great that this type family has such good Asian language support, but I wish the Roman design was more adventurous. In 5 years, these lookalike geometric sans will all feel so incredibly dated. It already looks like it could go on a Material Design mockup from 2015.

If you're going to pay a foundry to create a custom face, why wouldn't you make it distinctive enough to feel "yours?" It's like having one of the world's top architects make a near-exact copy of a suburban tract home.

If you want adventurous fonts, try:

Open Dyslexic: https://opendyslexic.org Using this font will make you brain look at similarly shaped sans serifs in strange ways. You can configure Claude Web to use this font.

Atkinson Hyperlegible: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/ Pushing aging eyes with smaller display fonts in the terminal. I found the Braille Institute’s Atkinson Hyperlegible to have very good readability in small sizes.

For those who don't know about LINE, it's something like WhatsApp but with tons of advertisements and hateful contents. It's the worst chat app imaginable.

I thought the original LINE had made a typeface, bummer. https://www.lineimprint.com/

The right-hand side menu gives strong early-2000s flashbacks — or should I say, Flash-backs...

Everything comes back in fashion again.

I just inspected it to see how they did the animations for those. Something in javascript is updating the img src attribute at 60fps, which is an absolutely insane way to code that IMO

Right, surely the icons could be SVGs, with the background orbs stored as a base64 PNG (or maybe a specular lighting filter?), with the foreground icons made to move via an updating displacement map?

Even if they didn't want to go that route, What I've seen google do in the past is render every frame to a texture atlas, and write a CSS animation which updates the background-position property at 60 frames a second, so at least you don't have to load 150 images at a time

That also sounds very reasonable

I've not a clue what Line is, but their front page contains this gem:

>Listen, Watch and <br>Sing along.

How the hell does that happen in the year of our Lord 2025?

LINE is super popular in Japan and Thailand, where it's the most common messaging platform (although Instagram is most definitely encroaching on both markets.)

There's so much happening in the mobile app space that a lot of westerners aren't aware of, it's kinda crazy when you think about it. Line has 178 million active users across its largest markets (and hundreds of millions of accounts), WeChat has 1.3 billion users (and 3.7 million apps on its platform), QQ has hundreds of millions, etc.

Granted, Facebook apparently has 3 billion active users per month.

WhatsApp is the core of Indian society, so Meta (not just Facebook) must have well over 3 billion MAUs at this point.

Japan, that's how. The amount of modern Japanese websites I've seen using iframes and tables for layout is astonishing

their front page also opens with the font control overlapping the text paragraph. not awe inspiring

How long did it take to do the Kanji?

Considering most kanji are made of 219 radicals (with a few subvariants), I'd wager: Not as long as you'd expect.

What is the license situation here?

> All fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, Version1.1.

> This license is also available with a FAQ at: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL

You get this by clicking the "LINE Seed LICENSE" link at the bottom. Unfortunately just a JavaScript popup, so can't be direct-linked.

I searched for the string ”lic”, found nothing. But I’m on a phone.

The links are using images instead of texts in the footer, which is well not ideal as they are not searchable.

single-storey `a` is my favorite!!

Sorry, it's just yet another faceless and generic font like 100s of others...

One that supports Japanese, Thai, Korean and Chinese in addition to Latin. I don't think there's many of those out there, especially not with an open license.

Me being harsh (I admit) on the aesthetics doesn't imply diminishing the actual utility of the font.

This font actually has quite a bit of character.

is this necessary?

More than likely LINE was paying a lot of font licensing fees for some font usage somewhere and paying one time to develop this font will pay for itself. Corporate font announcements always crack me up because they try to make something incredibly mundane sound like high art. But this was probably a financial decision!

My question would be more like "how do you convince the shareholders that this expense is necessary?" Because I bet that for most people this is just Arial or whatever word uses

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