So many product ideas – not so many years left to implement them all.  How does the solo bootstrapper choose which ideas to proceed with?  One idea filter that MojiMagic passed for me was that there should be more than one moderately innovative facet to the idea.  So full CJK support right down into the glyph editor would be one innovation.  A second innovative facet is the concept of resurrecting what was great about METAFONT as a parametric stroke-based font programming language, and marrying that with the seemingly conflicting desire of mainstream font designers to edit font outlines in a GUI.

Time is short for blog editing right now – just wanted to make the point after a long timeout that MojiMagic is not just about CJK.

• 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.