Chinese character description languages

The Chinese character description languages are several proposed languages to most accurately and completely describe Chinese (or CJKV) characters and information such their list of components, list of strokes (basic and complex), their order, and the localization of each of them on a background empty square. Work on this is currently led by the CDL of the Wenlin Institute, the SCML, and the Hanglyph languages. They are designed to overcome the inherent lack of information within a bitmap description. This enriched information can be utilized to identify variants of characters that are unified into one code point by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, as well as to provide an alternative form of encoding for rare characters that do not yet have a standardized encoding in Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646. They all aim to work for Kaishu style and Song style, as well as to provide the character's internal structure which can be used for easier look-up of a character by indexing the character's internal make-up and cross-referencing among similar characters.

CDL

Chinese Character Description Language is a font technology, based on XML, co-created by Tom Bishop and Richard Cook for the Wenlin Institute, designed for describing any CJK character, but suitable for describing any glyph.

This XML-based declarative language actually defines the stroke order of each component (a la a radical), as well as assembly of previously-defined components to build up evermore complex characters. Many of these components are characters in their own right, in addition to serving as building-block components.

The background looks like a square of 128 pixels on each side. In this background:

1. Each kind of stroke can be drawn in SVG (more than 50 strokes).
2. A basic component is composed by calling several strokes. In this component, each stroke is described by its bottom-left and top-right corner. Transformations are possible (reduction, enlargement, etc.). There are more than 1,000 basic components.
3. A character is composed by calling several components. In this character, each component is described by its bottom-left and top-right corner. In order for a component to fit into its proper portion of the Chinese character's rectangular block, a component may be transformed (e.g., horizontal or vertical reduction or enlargement) upon its use as a building-block embedded within a containing more-complex character.

Accordingly, a set of 50 strokes allow one to construct a set of 1,000 components which may in turn be embedded within tens of thousands characters' descriptions. A change in the shape of one of the 50 basic strokes is implicitly applied within each character that embeds that stroke. Likewise, a change to a component is implicitly applied within each character whose assemblage uses that component.

T. Bishop and R. Cook explain this by the words :

"The stroke count of one character is generally related to the stroke counts of other characters. Most characters are built from components, and as long as the stroke counts of those components are defined, there is rarely any difficulty in adding them together to obtain the combined stroke count. Therefore, if a standard defines the strokes of a few thousand characters, it implicitly defines the strokes of many thousands of additional characters."^[1]

As of Spring 2003, over 50,000 Chinese characters had been described via CDL. As of 29 July 2009, 73,254 Chinese characters had been described via CDL.^[2]

SCML

In 2007, Structural Character Modeling Language was proposed as a different kind of XML-based Chinese-character description language whose positioning is not based on a numerical grid, as CDL and HanGlyph are. The known database of characters whose strokes and components are encoded in SCML is for demonstration-of-principle only; no known effort exists to attempt to encode, say, all of Unicode's CJK characters in SCML.

HanGlyph

A Chinese-character description language that is based on the LaTex, TeX, MetaFont, and MetaPost toolsuite.

KanjiVG

KanjiVG is a free (CC-by-sa-3.0) Chinese character description language based on SVG, and a wiki system of edition.

Notes

1. ^ Bishop, Tom & Cook, Richard 2003 Oct. 31st, pp. 8–9, point n⁰12
2. ^ [1]

External links

CDL language from Wenlin Institute

• Bishop; Cook, CDL specification, http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/ 
• Bishop, Tom, Tom; Cook, Richard (2003 Oct. 31st), Specification for CDL, http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/cdl_spec_2003_10_31.pdf 
• Cook, Richard (2003, Oct. 26th), Chinese Character Description Languages, http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/03387-cook-cdl.pdf 
• Bishop, Tom (2007), A character description language for CJK, Multilingual, #91, Volume 18 Issue 7, pp. 62–8, http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rscook/bishop/MLC-CDL.pdf 
• Digital Humanities Start-up Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities

SCML

• Peebles, Daniel G.; Balkcom, Devin (Advisor) (2007, May 29), SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters, Technical Report TR2007-592, Dartmouth College, pp. 30, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2007-592.pdf 

HanGlyph

• HanGlyph — a Chinese Character Description Language - Presentation, http://www.hanglyph.com/en/hanglyph-index.shtml 
• HanGlyph — a Chinese Character Description Language - Reference Manual, 2003, Sept. 13th, pp. 31, http://www.hanglyph.com/en/hanglyph/reference.pdf 

See also

• Unicode
• List of Shuowen Jiezi radicals - a system of 540 components used by Xu Shen (d. ~147AD) in his Shuowen Jiezi
• List of Kangxi radicals - a system of 214 components used by the Kangxi dictionary (1716), made under Emperor Kangxi of Qing leadership
• List of unicode radicals － a modern and computer based ongoing attempt to create a complete and occurate set of CJK component list, led by Unicode.
• CJK characters
• stroke
• stroke order
• radical