Hello all,
I’m working on a font graphic for a computer game and want to add Japanese language support. But the Unicode standard is vast, and adding support for each block of Kana is taking a fair bit of time. In the interests of not doing pointless busy work that will never be used, I’d like to avoid very rarely used Unicode blocks, however I’m not sure what is/isn’t commonly used by native Japanese on a PC keyboard.
I know already that I am not adding Kanji support, as there are just far too many in Unicode (around 21,000) for me to hand-create a graphical character for each. I have added the Hiragana and Katakana blocks, and the common Number Kanji.
Looking at these two Unicode blocks, is anything in here important in day-to-day typing? Would people notice or run into problems if this block was excluded?
One is CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) punctuation variants of some sort, and the other is Full Width Latin Characters and Half Width Katakana.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK\_Symbols\_and\_Punctuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Symbols_and_Punctuation)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth\_and\_Fullwidth\_Forms\_(Unicode\_block)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_Fullwidth_Forms_(Unicode_block))
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5 comments
As a programmer you seem to be doing something that should be handled by a game library. There’s no need to add “blocks”, you just add a Japanese font (make sure it’s _Japanese_ font by the way, many kanji fonts are Chinese), and your text rendering engine should do the rest.
you will definately need kanji support. you don’t need every single kanji, but there’s a list of about 2000 which are used in government documents. just include those. there is also a list of about 500 more that are used in names.
also, you should include “cjk” symbols and punctuation, because many of those characters are commonly used, as well as the full-width latin letters.
also, you don’t need to do all of the characters in the kana blocks. there are very rare characters in there like “yori”.
adding just kana is hardly japanese language support. i’d look into ways of making it easier to include kanji as well.
There should be plenty of fonts you can use. Even if you are making a retro 8-bit game, there are bitmap fonts.
Old SNES game use bitmap fonts so limit themself to a simple Hiragana/Katakana support. But i don’t see the point to add a limited kanji support, you can still use the “famous” 1945 most commons kanji (but there are more nowadays) but saying more about your project, it’s hard to give you a proper solution.
EDIT : You can also add punctuations, ect.. like 。「」＊、ー