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.
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!
For those who are wondering what Line is, itās 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.
Off-topic but, what has prevented "super apps" from becoming a thing in the West? Antitrust laws? Infrastructure? Or just cultural differences?
Itās 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 āmeaningful frictionā, a concept that someone else has definitely already coined: that āsome 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.ā
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.
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.
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 right-hand side menu gives strong early-2000s flashbacks ā 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?
I thought the original LINE had made a typeface, bummer. https://www.lineimprint.com/
single-storey `a` is my favorite!!
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.
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