Vanilla Mahjong is an experimental typography project that explores representing Mahjong tiles as textual symbols.
Rather than treating Mahjong tiles as pictographic icons, emojis, or game UI assets, this project approaches them as elements of a writing system. The focus is on canonical tile forms, rule semantics, and Chinese-character-based orthography, with typography as the primary design concern.
Unicode already defines a Mahjong tile block, and existing fonts such as the Noto family provide baseline glyph coverage. However, these implementations primarily target minimal correctness and fallback rendering, rather than typographic integration.
Vanilla Mahjong explores an alternative direction:
- Mahjong treated as text rather than UI
- Tile faces expressed using Chinese characters
- Typographic consistency with CJK text
- Rule-aware presentation, including canonical color usage
- Semantic variation implemented via OpenType features instead of ad hoc glyph duplication
The intent is not to replace or redesign existing Mahjong glyphs, but to construct a coherent typographic system around them.
This repository currently functions as a placeholder.
Planned work may include, but is not limited to:
- A Mahjong-dedicated font designed in alignment with CJK typographic conventions
- OpenType features for stylistic and semantic variants
- Support for canonical Chinese and Japanese Mahjong conventions
- Optional LaTeX tooling for textual Mahjong typesetting
- Documentation of typographic, orthographic, and design decisions
Implementation is expected to begin at a later stage.
- Mahjong tile faces are written using Chinese characters.
- Auxiliary numeric, alphabetic, or Latin markings are treated as annotations and excluded.
- Unmarked and default forms are treated as the baseline.
- English terminology is used for explanation only and does not replace Mahjong orthography.
This project is currently in a dormant, pre-implementation phase.
The repository exists to reserve the project namespace and to document design
intent.
Active development is expected to begin at a later time.
The contents of this repository are released under the BSD 3-Clause License.
This repository currently contains design notes and documentation only.
Font binaries, if published in the future, may be distributed under a different
license.
See the LICENSE file for details.
The term “Vanilla” is used in the engineering sense:
default, unadorned, and baseline, rather than simplified or decorative.