On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 18:27:09 -0800 (PST), Kenneth Whistler wrote: > > Of the 64 entities listed on the page: > > http://www.chinavoc.com/arts/calligraphy/eightstroke.asp > > *none* of them are encoded, and *none* of them are "standard" > enough to merit consideration -- if by consideration you mean > separate encoding as characters. >
I'm not sure about "*none* of them are encoded". As far as I can tell, pretty much most of the basic ideographic stroke forms are either already encoded in CJK and CJK-B or are proposed in CJK-C (where "encoded" here means "encoded in their own right" or "can be represented by same-shaped ideographs"). See for example the IRG document <http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg19/N927_Add%202%20Strokes%20to%20C1.doc> which states : <quote> Although most ideographic strokes have been encoded in CJK (including Ext.A and B) or submitted to CJK_C1 by IRG members, there are two ideographic strokes are found missing. Ideographic strokes are important for ideograph decomposition, analysis and for making ideographic strokes subset. Chinese linguists suggest to add these two ideographic strokes to CJK_C1. </quote> I also remember reading one WG2 document that explicitly raised the question of how to deal with all the ideographic strokes proposed in CJK-C that are not distinct ideographs in their own right, although I can't seem to locate that document any more. All except one of the eight basic strokes mentioned at <http://www.chinavoc.com/arts/calligraphy/eightstroke.asp> are *representable* using existing characters in the CJK and/or Kangxi Radicals blocks : dot = U+4E36 or U+2F02 [KANGXI RADICAL DOT] dash = U+4E00 or U+2F00 [KANGXI RADICAL ONE] perpendicular downstroke = U+4E28 or U+2F01 [KANGXI RADICAL LINE] downstroke to the left or left-falling stroke = U+4E3F or U+2F03 [KANGXI RADICAL SLASH] wavelike stroke or right-falling stroke = U+4E40 hook = U+4E85 or U+2F05 [KANGXI RADICAL HOOK], as well as U+4E5A and U+2010C upstroke to the right = bend or twist = U+4E5B and U+200CC I concur with Ken that the 8x8 stroke categorization given at this web site is largely artificial. Whilst it may be useful to encode general ideographic stroke forms to help in the analysis and decomposition of ideographs, in my opinion the minute distinctions in the way that dots and dashes are written in various individual ideographs are beyond the scope of a character encoding system as the exact shape of a dot or length of a dash is irrelevant to any analysis of the compositional structure of an ideograph. Andrew
