One hopes Apple is spending the money and time to get those differences right for each language group, C+J+K if you will, because it’s not easy. Just as western based baseline font technology can’t reproduce high quality vertical kanji layout, all in one CJK designs can’t reproduce high quality typography across languages. CJK is a kind of snub intended to keep the cultural flow one way by neatly collapsing important differences as ‘CJK styles’ for the convenience of westerners who can’t be bothered to understand what those differences are. There are Kanji created in Japan that have migrated the other way.

Chinese is merely the start point for centuries of cultural evolutions and written language aesthetics that are distinctly different for each language. Like using a leaf blower to blow and hide dirt everywhere instead of removing the dirt by neatly sweeping the mess into a bag. I’m not a fan of the CJK name and the mental baggage that comes with it because it’s one of those western concoctions that deal with pesky Asian cultural differences by sweeping those differences under the rug of indifference. This is not a WWDC23 prediction, but at some point Apple will certainly unveil a variable San Francisco CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) system font to match the rest of the Apple SF font family, and it will be unveiled at WWDC.

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