Chinese Character Synthesis

A serious problem for Chinese information exchange in the Internet era is the sheer number of Chinese characters. Commonly used character encoding systems cannot include all characters, since they are not all catalogued; as a result, fonts cannot possible contain all the characters either. In professional and scholarly documents, unencoded characters arise often. This situation hinders the development of Chinese information exchange: special care must be taken to handle unencoded characters using techniques such as embedding characters as images. This thesis presents a systematic attempt to solve this problem. The approach is based on the intrinsic characteristic of Chinese characters that each character is formed by combining strokes and radicals. A Chinese character description language named Hanglyph has been defined, in order to capture the topological relation of the strokes in a character. Hanglyph descriptions are converted into graphical representations through the Chinese Character Synthesis System (CCSS), implemented in Metapost. Preliminary results show that the approach is feasible and can be applied to many areas other than information exchange.