I think this is a rare “useful” abuse of font ligatures, and in that respect I think this is a cool project, but it's also a terrible idea that nobody should actually use, because Japanese kanji readings are famously ambiguous and context-dependent. The modal character has two different readings without counting those used in personal names, nor contextual slight changes to pronunciation. Some characters have six different readings, and that's again without counting those used in personal names. There's no way a font can do a good job at it unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.

For context, it's a hard enough problem that Google Translate's own romanised pronunciation guides are frequently wrong, or disagree with their text-to-speech.

Really nice font! Native Japanese speaker here, and seeing furigana done purely in the font is very cool.

One small thing on the Japanese version of the page: in the "Ligatures do the work" section, 合字 itself only gets じ over 字, and 合 has no reading. It should be ごうじ. I guess 合字 isn't in the dictionary, so it falls back to single kanji, and 合 is skipped because it has several readings.

Automatic furigana is not really possible to be reliable considering readings heavily rely on context that can't be easily inferred, but I'm sure it will help some people who can't read very well.

This is very cool. Unfortunate that it gives the wrong pronunciation when words get split in a line wrap (e.g., 大学 got split between lines and changed to incorrect furigana for me).

This is really nice. I'm able to read Hiragana and Katakana fully after about 4-6 weeks now but then I'm hit with the reality of how many Kanji I have to learn still everytime I want to read something in real life lol

I'm seeing Chinese versions of kanji on this website; the HTML might need a language annotation or something. https://i.postimg.cc/NGTvHP4x/Screenshot-2026-10-17-at-12-00...

That’s incredible. I’m always impressed with the utility of the TrueType/open font spec - the flexibility there is really an underappreciated work of engineering genius.

This is an interesting use of ligatures for sure. However, I really don't know when one would use it. Couldn't you just use Ruby tags for a website?

> With the ligatures to adopt to pronunciation of words.

Maybe it is:

With the ligatures to adApt to pronunciation of words.

This is AWESOME for Japanese learners. There are 46 basic hiragana that represent the sounds of Japanese but many thousands of Kanji, and it’s incredibly hard to read Japanese even if you’ve been studying for years.

A few people here rightly pointing out inaccuracies and other methods of display (ie Ruby tags) but IMO they are somewhat missing the usefulness here - there are many applications (ie e-readers, random web contexts, custom apps etc) where the traditional methods of display are hard or fail. I recently ran into it trying to get custom Japanese ebooks to display furigana with ruby tags on my kindle. It’s a giant nightmare. Excited to try this out.

I want furigana on display glasses, like Even Realities. Since the application would know my vocabulary, it can show just the words that I'm not likely to know.

Assuming you could hint the furigana from the application, the phonetic transcript would make it more accurate.

nice, we could do a lithuanian stress font this way too

This could be really useful as a decoding tool when you don’t know the kanji

If you want to make romaji, I built Pingtype:

https://pingtype.github.io/japanese.html

It also supports line breaking, so that words don't get cut in half when wrapping text.

This is cool!

> javascript is required ... due to browser limitations

confusing when you don't explain which limktations this is