Show HN: A font that auto-translates Chinese (bryanhu.com)

5 points by thatxliner 2mo ago ↗ HN

Hello, this was a funny idea I had. I knew that you could do crazy things with fonts (like play a video game in one: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html)

but with ligatures, I was thinking about how much could you actually push them? I decided to try making a font that literally translates Chinese characters (with some context-aware rules/replacements for common phrases).

Turns out, this experiment took only several minutes to make with Claude Code and works surprisingly well!

3 comments

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rixed 2mo ago ↗

Does not work on FF, iOS : the translation is drawn with the same font.

rixed 2mo ago ↗

I really find this amazing, gives you the feeling that learning the ideograms would be enough to get the gist of most texts. Quite bright yet simple hack.

I wish HN would feature more projects like this one instead of wtv is currently on the first page.

thatxliner 2mo ago ↗

TY!!

Yea this actually has been going viral when I posted it on Instagram. Maybe I'll need to post this on HN in a different time or wait for someone else to organically post it :)