I think this is a rare “useful” abuse of font ligatures, and in that respect I think this is a cool project, but it's also a terrible idea that nobody should actually use, because Japanese kanji readings are famously ambiguous and context-dependent. The modal character has two different readings without counting those used in personal names, nor contextual slight changes to pronunciation. Some characters have six different readings, and that's again without counting those used in personal names. There's no way a font can do a good job at it unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.
For context, it's a hard enough problem that Google Translate's own romanised pronunciation guides are frequently wrong, or disagree with their text-to-speech.
I agree, and if anything the problem is even worse. You mentioned characters with 6 readings, here's one with more than 30:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F
And while you can usually figure out which reading applies based on what follows, there are still many cases where you can't. A standalone 今日 can be any of "konnichi", "kyou" or "konjitsu" depending on context and intent.
> unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time ;)
https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
> There's no way a font can do a good job at it unless you can somehow stuff an entire LLM in there.
I’d say you can do a pretty good job with conditional random fields.
Yeah, I already see a few mistakes just looking at this page. But I guess still useful?
> but it's also a terrible idea that nobody should actually use, because Japanese kanji readings are famously ambiguous and context-dependent
Seems a bit drastic. Don't use it as the main font in a japanese textbook, sure, but use it with the disclaimer that it's not perfect and will get some readings wrong? Why not, still pretty useful. Should people also not use Google Translate? (also, you can stuff an entire llm in a font, it's been done).
The point of furigana is to be exact - it's a pronunciation guide, and its purpose is to distinguish or to teach. If it's wrong, then nothing makes sense.
If I asked you 'are you a sewer (pronounced "soo-er")?', would that make sense? Maybe if you looked at it hard enough and thought about it, but in the meantime, I would probably get some very strange looks for asking.
It's funny to see LLMs being mentioned, because this is yet another case where "good enough" is, after all, not good enough once you know how "good enough" should be.
You're underestimating how wrong this is going to be on average. This is going to be nonsense like half the time. It's not comparable to Google Translate, it's more comparable to Babel Fish circa 1997.