Cloudy Kanji

I checked the Yahoo!® weather report this morning to find this lovely 10pt anti-aliased kanji:

Fortunately the little cloud makes it clear, but without that I would be hard-pressed to figure out what that character on the left is. Here is a blown-up version:

Very helpful. Here is what the actual characters look like at full resolution in Hiragino, the default “CJK” (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font for Mac OS X:

I know that there’s not really anything that can be done for characters this complex at current screen resolutions. In fact, this kanji has 10 horizontal layers which have to be represented in about the same number of pixels, so it’s amazing that the anti-aliasing can give any sense of the character at all. But I was still amused at just how unreadable it was, even if you know what the character is supposed to look like. As someone who is only just starting to learn kanji, I wouldn’t even be able to determine the layout of the character so I could look it up in a book.

Incidentally, here’s what it looked like when I turned off the system anti-aliasing:

In some ways better, in some ways worse. The 10 layers have been condensed into 6 by the strategic removal of “redundant” lines. I’m glad I’m not the guy that had to hint this.

Law and Order Special Letters Unit

Font identification, Muppet style: