From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Mon Sep 24 2007 - 19:58:49 CDT
Quoting "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@apple.com>:
>
> On Sep 24, 2007, at 12:55 PM, Gerrit Sangel wrote:
>
>> I want to write Biáng biáng (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang)
>
>> I read about the Ideographic Description Characters, but as far as I?ve
>> understood it, they are only for graphically description of a character, so
>> the reader has to compose it for himself in his mind or rather on a sheet of
>> paper.
>>
>
> For most cases, you can easily do it in your mind because only two or
> three characters are being combined.
>
If there is only one IDS in a text it is possible to do so by eye,
however it is very difficult to do this in a text where several IDS
occur together.
>> But I?d like to write these characters in a usual text so that the user can
>> read it normally. Would this be possible or is there a plan to offer this
>> feature (maybe something like Cangjie)?
>>
>
> It is not currently possible. The problems of producing an arbitrary
> glyph on-the-fly from an IDS and having it look halfway decent are very
> complex, and there's almost no utility in it. There is the CDL
> description scheme also under development which does better than IDS,
> but except for Wenlin, there are no products currently shipping taking
> advantage of it.
>
Whilst the character you mentioned is very complex, staistically
speaking about 80% of characters are represented clearly by IDS, well
known combinations of these could be included as precomposed glyphs in
a font file. Even making on the fly glyphs of these is not that
difficult with present day computers.
Whilst IDS are freely available, the CDL seems to be copyrighted by
Wenlin. Actually CDL is cartesian which is not the way Chinese
characters are formed and so though it contains one possible
representation of a character, better is to be able to store how the
characters are formed.
John Knightley
> =====
> John H. Jenkins
> jenkins@apple.com
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