Re: Hello!

Hello Erik,

2009/5/24 Erik Weitnauer <eweitnauer <at> googlemail.com>:
> I see, that sounds very reasonable. Do you know of a way to display
> these CDP characters, preferrably under linux? And is there any way to
> translate these CDP codes to unicode (of course only in the cases
> there is an unicode entry for it).
> I was on the CDP website [http://cdp.sinica.edu.tw/service/], and they
> even offer some files to download. However, its some Windows and
> VisualBasic specific software and I am not sure if I should follow
> this path any further. (Also Chinese websites are unfortunately still
> kind of scary for me...)

I do not know if this will be of any use to you, but for displaying
CDP characters you might take a look at GlyphWiki. Because these CDP
characters have no Unicode codepoints we cannot use them directly in a
font as you would with Chinese characters in Unicode unless you use a
font that puts them in the private use area, but with GlyphWiki at
least you know how to draw them. The KAGE engine is a renderer for the
character definitions at GlyphWiki, using scalable vector graphics.
Not all CDP characters are registered there though, so its usefulness
may be limited to you:

http://en.glyphwiki.org/
http://fonts.jp/kage/

Example:
http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/cdp-8bd3

I am currently designing a dictionary interface somewhat similar to
what you are proposing, but (initially) for the Japanese language.
Although I am still in the designing phase of the software I want to
create, I have had some succes implementing a widget that can draw the
Chinese characters defined at GlyphWiki using a vector graphics
library. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more about this
approach.

Unfortunately, the GlyphWiki community is mostly Japanese, so there
might be a language barrier there.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Hoek