[alexlur]

There’s no language called “Japanese Kanji” since it’s just a regular part of the language, but the books are larger simply because Japanese is an agglutinative language whose famously long suffixes outweigh whatever information density advantage using the characters has.

[WalterBright]

Kanji is the script. Anyhow, one thing I noticed was that Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it. ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.

[cyphar]

> Kanji is the script.

Kanji is part of the Japanese writing system, it's not the entire thing. "Translated to Japanese kanji" is like saying "translated to English consonants".

> Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it.

Japanese books also have a lot more whitespace and are generally smaller than western books. I disagree that the font is much larger -- the books I read have a font size that is practically identical to most western books (the difference is that CJK characters are more boxy and so they may appear larger).

> ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.

You can print kanji pretty small and have it still them be legible to native speakers (just look at the first video games that used kanji instead of just using kana -- the effective font size is tiny).

[alexlur]

Kanji is not the only script in the written Japanese language, in fact it’s not even the most used script by a large margin. Kanji usually makes up less than 30% of the text while kana is around 70%.[1] Both kana, which are phonetic syllabaries, are also larger than ASCII, so chances are you confused them with kanji.

1. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234725928.pdf

[dghf]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_form...

[euroderf]

I've often thought, what if early CRT hackers (or, say, Apple) had designed fonts where characters could have widths of 1, 2, or 3 units, such that (for example) "W" and "M" would be 3-wide and "i" an "l" and "." would be 1-wide. Might this have lessened the desire for variable-pitch fonts, and sped GUI innovation in general ?