For those who are wondering what Line is, it’s a Japanese messenger turned super-app [0]
> Line became Japan's largest social network in 2013 and is used by over 70% of the population as of 2023; it is also popular mainly in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.
The font looks decent, nice of them to have it under the SIL Open Font License.
As someone who regularly works with Japanese and Thai, I'm very excited about this, given it has English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Traditional Chinese as its basic set. Thai itself is complex to layout[^a], and it can be very hard to find a matching typeface. I guess LINE has this problem too, given the app is popular in both Japan and Thailand.
It is, however, a bit unfortunate that this is yet another unlooped Thai typeface[1]. Loopless is impossible to read as a body text for people above thirty. Historically, IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped[2] was pretty much the only open-source stylized Thai font that is looped (not including the standard Tlwg set). I remembered that Noto Sans Thai[3] used to be looped, but they switched to a loopless version at one point. Thankfully they've (re?)introduced the looped version[4] in recent years.
[^a]: Since Thai text typically requires another ascent level above cap height and ascender, and another level under descender for tone markers and vowels, on iOS, if you add Thai as one of the phone languages, iOS will apply a 1.2x line height modifier to all text in the system, either by expanding line-height when allowed, or shrinking the font size.
This sounds plausible. Unicode as used and implemented on modern OS has a nasty quirk that texts become patchy mix of the language in use + random Simplified Chinese equivalents(apparently the opposite still randOmly haPPEn in Simplified Chinese systems too - showing Japanese pieces out of nowhere). The official Unicode Consortium sanctioned solution to this problem is to specify and switch fonts wherever and however appropriate, even mid-sentences, which isn't a great solution, if not unreasonable for a lot of developers.
Creating language-specific fonts that can be just forced everywhere to eliminate random pieces from other languages solves this problem. At least everything will be consistent.
I'm a bit envious of people who can spend so much attention, time, resources on a font that to me appears as yet another one out there. The presentation is great.
It's great that this type family has such good Asian language support, but I wish the Roman design was more adventurous. In 5 years, these lookalike geometric sans will all feel so incredibly dated. It already looks like it could go on a Material Design mockup from 2015.
If you're going to pay a foundry to create a custom face, why wouldn't you make it distinctive enough to feel "yours?" It's like having one of the world's top architects make a near-exact copy of a suburban tract home.
For those who don't know about LINE, it's something like WhatsApp but with tons of advertisements and hateful contents. It's the worst chat app imaginable.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] thread> Line became Japan's largest social network in 2013 and is used by over 70% of the population as of 2023; it is also popular mainly in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.
The font looks decent, nice of them to have it under the SIL Open Font License.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)
>Listen, Watch and <br>Sing along.
How the hell does that happen in the year of our Lord 2025?
It is, however, a bit unfortunate that this is yet another unlooped Thai typeface[1]. Loopless is impossible to read as a body text for people above thirty. Historically, IBM Plex Sans Thai Looped[2] was pretty much the only open-source stylized Thai font that is looped (not including the standard Tlwg set). I remembered that Noto Sans Thai[3] used to be looped, but they switched to a loopless version at one point. Thankfully they've (re?)introduced the looped version[4] in recent years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typography#Looped_vs_loop...
[2]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans+Thai+Looped
[3]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai
[4]: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Thai+Looped
[^a]: Since Thai text typically requires another ascent level above cap height and ascender, and another level under descender for tone markers and vowels, on iOS, if you add Thai as one of the phone languages, iOS will apply a 1.2x line height modifier to all text in the system, either by expanding line-height when allowed, or shrinking the font size.
Creating language-specific fonts that can be just forced everywhere to eliminate random pieces from other languages solves this problem. At least everything will be consistent.
Everything comes back in fashion again.
If you're going to pay a foundry to create a custom face, why wouldn't you make it distinctive enough to feel "yours?" It's like having one of the world's top architects make a near-exact copy of a suburban tract home.