It’s Japanese …
- 文字 (moji) – character/glyph
- マジック (majikku) – magic
- の開発 – (no kaihatsu) – the development of
… so “The Development of MojiMagic – A Font Editor for CJK“.
Font Nazis will no doubt correctly lambast me for confounding terminology. Moji, character, glyph – it’s easy to get mixed up sometimes. Yannis Haralambous and Scott Horne are certainly not in that FN category, but in Fonts & Encodings (page 55) they do helpfully distinguish character and glyph as follows:
Let’s be pragmatic! In this book we shall adopt a practical definition of the character, starting with the definition of glyph as a point of departure:
- A glyph is the image of a symbol used in a writing system used in a writing system (in an alphabet, in a syllabary, a set of ideographs, etc.).
- A character is the simple description, primarily linguistic or logical, of an equivalence class of glyphs.
…
So glyphs are images, whereas characters are rather more than that as they include phonetic and/or semantic information too. moji seems to be somewhat in between character and glyph, as it is often associated in Japanese with calligraphy. And that’s the kind of feeling that I wanted for my font editor, as I am planning to innovate primarily in the area of sketching the shapes of the glyphs. Plus the domain name mojimagic.com was available, and I am partial to a bit of gratuitous alliteration.
Next time I plan to post a little about why I am writing a font editor for CJK.