Ideograph Variants-What They Are and How To Handle Them
Qin Lu - The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts |
| Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate |
Ideographic variants have been created and used since the start of the
ideographic characters for many different reasons, and different people
have different understanding of variants. Some variants are created purely
for different calligraphy style, some are due to extensions in meanings.
Variants are very confusing and ideograph variants have been causing problems
in computerization of Chinese information. Unicode in its early stage has a
lot of problem with variants and a set of unification rules were developed
to avoid giving unnecessary code points for variants. However, there are
still a lack of systematic study and handling on CJK variant handling.
This paper will first give the definition of Chinese variants, they discusses
the issues in variant representation. It further discusses the feasibility of
using the variant symbols introduced in Unicode fort the representation of
variants. It then goes through the character decomposition scheme for an
algorithmic way to extract variant information of different characters.
Keywords: Character decomposition, ideograph variants, new applications
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