Improve Japanese glyphs in NobleSans

[micahcowan]

Hi! The Japanese characters in NobleSans currently have some issues that I think amount to deal-breakers in using it for that language (at least, for me personally they do).

Tsu and shi confusion. The biggest issue is probably that your ツ (tsu) looks too much like a シ (shi). I know that this is a common general complaint about those two characters; but in this case I think a native Japanese person would read your ツ as a シ, and be fairly confused if they found it being used as a "tsu". The main issue with it is that the right small mark appears substantially above the left one, and both marks are too diagonal. If you look at the actual character ツ here (regardless of what font you're seeing it with), those two marks should be very nearly even, horizontally, not arranged diagonally. In a small font like this, they should be exactly on the same vertical level (the same horizontal line). They also needn't be angled—it would be better to have the marks straight up and down than for them to have their current steep diagonal.

(The same issue with ツ appears with ヅ, and to a lesser extent the small ッ (but that one is saved by virtue of the fact that you don't really encounter a small シ (shi) character... I apparently can't even type one).

Dakuten inconsistency. The other issue I notice is that for the various characters that have the dakuten ゛marks, their form is inconsistent, and often confusable with the handakuten ゜marks. To be sure, your handakuten is clearly distinguishable from your dakuten; but if (as can easily happen) a string of Japanese text one only sees the dakuten, the one on ボ, ぼ, and ぶ could easily be taken for ポ, ぽ, or ぷ, since they appear to form a ball rather than two distinct marks. There are many other characters where the dakuten looks like they could be handakuten, but most of the other characters are ones that don't take handakuten, so it probably matters less for them. I suspect the ヷ (Apparently a rare old form of ヴァ "va") could be taken as プ ("pu"), but since no one's going to use that it doesn't really matter.

But, quite a few of your dakuten marks are clearly identifiable as dakuten marks, appearing as two clearly distinct strokes - the ones where both marks are vertically level (on the same horizontal line). For example, in your バビブベ. It's the ones where the left mark is slid further right-and-down, that they appear to form a small circle.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Thanks for making such a useful-looking engine for the PlayDate, and especially for releasing the source code publicly!

[Mark-LaCroix]

Nice! I solicited opinions from native users when I created the font and got some help on these same concerns, but this great feedback. Thanks!

[Mark-LaCroix]

I'm not going to call this a bug, but that doesn't mean it doesn't for sure need improvement.