On the Automatised Generation of a Japanese Banduke Table
Antoine Bossard · Baltic Journal of Modern Computing · 2022
Banduke tables are a traditional Japanese mean of communicating rankings and other organisation charts.They are well-known in Japan especially thanks to their continued usage to announce details of sumo wrestling competitions.Such tables were also used in earlier centuries for instance to publish the names of the wealthiest individuals in the country.Traditional banduke tables feature a characteristic, visually impacting design which is difficult to reproduce on computer systems.And, the automatisation of the generation of such a chart is even more challenging.In this paper, in order to keep this cultural heritage alive, we investigate this automatisation issue and propose a system which generates banduke tables.This work notably starts with an analysis of the various elements and zones that are essential to the structure of a banduke table.After presenting technical details of the proposed generation system, like the generation flow of such an organisation chart, we address the critical character rendering issue.The details of character box calculations are formally described.The obtained results are very promising in that the charts that can be produced by our proposal look very realistic.Besides, we have also quantitatively evaluated the generated tables by comparing them to original documents, five in total, some of which were obtained with the help of museums of Japanese history.Both traditional tables and ones of our modern, printing era were used for this comparison experiment.(This paper is an extended version of Bossard (2022).