Comment by sirn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirn | Hacker News Reader

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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