Furifont bakes furigana directly into the font itself
Furifont, a Japanese font that shows furigana
Furifont is a Japanese font that displays furigana reading aids on the characters themselves through ligatures, so it works anywhere custom fonts are supported. It offers Sans and Serif families with hiragana or romaji annotations, variable and static weights, and a web version that adds space for the readings. A bookmarklet and userscript toggle it on any page, though sites like X and GitHub block cross-origin font loading. The creator cautions that some readings may be incorrect.
Furifont is a Japanese font that shows furigana on the font itself.
- TazeTSchnitzel
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.
- shun_dev
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.
- teshigahara
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.
- jwolfe
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).
- alasano
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