Chinese character description languages

CDL of cascading components approach.

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

This XML-based declarative language defines the stroke order of each component (a subunit of the glyph similar to a radical, but not necessarily bearing the semantic significance of a true radical), as well as assembly of previously defined components to build up ever more 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 of about 50 strokes can be drawn in SVG.
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 less than 50 strokes[1] allow one to construct a set of about 1,000 components[2] which may in turn be embedded within tens of thousands of characters' descriptions.[2] 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 and all characters whose assemblage uses that component.[2]

T. Bishop and R. Cook explain this as follows:

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.[3]

As of 2020, nearly 100,000 Chinese characters have been described via CDL.[4]

A character description language intended for supplying missing rare characters in documents (addressing the Chinese equivalent of the gaiji problem).[5] Documents can contain markup for missing characters, which will automatically trigger the generation of small fonts to provide the characters. The language itself is a simple postfix notation describing strokes and ways to combine them. The prototype software uses Metapost to render the characters and embed them in LaTeX documents. The language was presented by Wai Wong in 1997,[6] and papers about its implementation in Metapost and LaTeX appeared at TeX user group conferences in 2003.[7][8]

Chapter 12 of the Unicode specification[9] defines a syntax for "Ideographic Description Sequences" (IDSs) intended for use in describing characters not included in the standard in terms of combinations of components that do have code points. Sixteen special characters in the range U+2FF0 to U+2FFF act as prefix operators to combine other characters or sequences to form larger characters.

Two additional ideographic description characters are scattered in other Unicode blocks. Note that U+303E 〾 IDEOGRAPHIC VARIATION INDICATOR is not officially an ideographic description character, but is sometimes used in ideographic description sequences.

These sequences are useful in describing to the reader a character that is not directly printable, either because it is absent in a given font, or is absent from the Unicode standard altogether. For example, the Sawndip character "" (encoded in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F as U+2DA21 𭨡) can be described as "⿰書史". Another use is for dictionary lookup purposes, as a sort of rough input method for queries.

These sequences can be rendered either by keeping the individual characters separately or by parsing the Ideographic Description Sequence and drawing the ideograph so described.[10] They do not, by themselves, provide unambiguous rendering for all characters. For instance, the sequence ⿱十一 represents both 土 ("soil", the middle bar being narrower) and 士 ("bachelor", the middle bar being wider).

Unicode's specification for these sequences is based on the characters and syntax of the earlier GBK standard. Additional symbols are later encoded to fill in the missing combinations.

The IDSgrep free software package by Matthew Skala[11][12] extends Unicode's IDS syntax to include additional features for dictionary lookup; it is capable of converting KanjiVG's database to its own extended IDS format, or of searching EIDS files generated by the related Tsukurimashou font family.

KanjiVG (Kanji Vector Graphics) is a free, Creative Commons-licensed Japanese character description language (intended to eventually expand to Chinese as well) based on the SVG vector graphics format.

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.

• Unicode
• List of Shuowen Jiezi radicals, a system of 540 components used by Xu Shen (d. ≈147 AD) in his Shuowen Jiezi
• List of Kangxi radicals, a system of 214 components used by the Kangxi dictionary (1716), made under the leadership of the Kangxi Emperor
• List of Unicode radicals, a modern and computer-based ongoing attempt to create a complete and accurate set of CJK component list, led by Unicode.
• Cangjie input method
• Radical
• Stroke
• Stroke order

CDL language from Wenlin Institute

• Wenlin Institute (2015), Wenlin User's Guide : Character Description Language
• Bishop, Tom; Cook, Richard, CDL specification
• Bishop, Tom; Cook, Richard (2003a), Character Description Language (CDL): The Set of Basic CJK Unified Stroke Types (PDF)
• Bishop, Tom; Cook, Richard (2003b), A Specification for CDL Character Description Language (PDF)
  • 2003/12/31 correction: Bishop, Tom; Cook, Richard (2003c), Specification for CDL (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-04-05, retrieved 2018-01-17
• Cook, Richard (2003), Chinese Character Description Languages (PDF)
• Bishop, Tom (2007), A character description language for CJK (PDF), Multilingual, #91, Volume 18 Issue 7, pp. 62–8
• Digital Humanities Start-up Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities

SCML

• Peebles, Daniel G. (May 29, 2007), SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters, Technical Report TR2007-592 (PDF), Devin, Balkcom (advisor), Dartmouth College, p. 30, archived from the original (PDF) on March 10, 2016, retrieved August 30, 2009{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

HanGlyph

• HanGlyph – a Chinese Character Description Language - Presentation, archived from the original on 2013-01-25, retrieved 2007-12-11
• HanGlyph – a Chinese Character Description Language - Reference Manual (PDF), 13 September 2003, p. 31, archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016, retrieved 11 December 2007