jckarter

everyone already knows i'm a dog

the swift programming language is my fault to some degree. mostly here to see dogs, shitpost, fix old computers, and/or talk about math and weird computer programming things. for effortposts check the #longpost pinned tag. asks are open.


email
mailto:joe@duriansoftware.com
discord
jckarter

mojilove
@mojilove

of course you did! and here it is:

amazingly, it seems to support both kana and kanji (if it doesn't have an image for any kanji, it seemingly converts it into kana automatically for you, or failing that just plonks a boring old modern typeface kanji right inside the text!)—i can't imagine how much of a slog it must have been to collect samples of printed type for this generator! what a fun little thing!!
just to give you a heads-up: the generated image is shareable via a link, but you can delete it by clicking the link labelled 画像の削除 in the middle of the text below the image after generation.

btw you should be able to use this app to convert the images into modern text data again

(translations and transcripts of images in alt text)


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mojilove's post:

this is fascinating, thanks for sharing! I keep wanting to actually learn how to read kuzushiji, i'm not sure i'll ever have the time but it'd be really cool to be able to...

also TIL kuzushiji were used in moveable type! i'd assumed they were only ever handwritten (or like, carved into woodblock prints I guess?) the bit from the soan homepage about type blocks for kuzushiji ligatures is also super cool

yeah learning to read kuzushiji takes a lot of time and effort, even just for hiragana (kanji is on a completely other level!). i think it would be very hard to learn without a teacher, but maybe tackling a text that you are already kind of familiar with and comparing your reading with the output from the miwo app might work (miwo isn't perfect but it is pretty darn good)

yeah, i don't know so much about the history, but there seem to have been a few attempts to make joined-up moveable type in Japanese (even one type foundry in the Meiji period made a hiragana font that had pseudo-joined-up glyphs: one set with a connecting line below, one set with connecting lines above and below, and one set with connecting lines above). it sounds like a nightmare to produce, organize, and arrange kuzushiji ligatures!