Chinese character synthesis using METAPOST
Candy Yiu, Wai‐Yeung Wong · 2003
A serious problem in Chinese information exchange in this rapidly advancing Internet time is the sheer quantity of characters. Commonly used character encoding systems cannot include all characters, and often fonts do not contain all characters either. In professional and scholarly documents, these unencoded characters are quite common. This situation hinders the development of information exchange because special care has to be taken to handle these characters, such as embedding the character as an image. This paper describes our attempt towards solving the problem. Our approach utilizes the intrinsic characteristic of Chinese characters, that is, each character is formed by combining strokes and radicals. We defined a Chinese character description language named HanGlyph, to capture the topological relation of the strokes in a character. We are developing a Chinese Character Synthesis System CCSS which transforms HanGlyph descriptions into graphical representations. A large part of the CCSS is implemented in METAPOST.