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parsimonhi / animCJK

Draw animated Japanese characters (Kanji and Kana), Korean characters (Hanja) and Chinese characters (Hanzi) in correct stroke order using svg, free open-source code.
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some radicals appear non-standard #39

Closed diceoh closed 8 months ago

diceoh commented 8 months ago

Hi, I noticed that the Japanese characters used in this set use the Kaishotai format for the 糸 radical (e.g. see 約). Was this an intentional choice? While not technically incorrect it is notably different from how it's generally written in most contexts in Japan. E.g. see Mincho, Gothic, Kyokasho styles here: https://kanji.jitenon.jp/kanjib/619.html

parsimonhi commented 8 months ago

Yes, AnimCJK uses the kaisho style. This is an intentional choice for several reasons.

1) We wanted the same font style for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It would have been difficult to choose any other style than the kaisho style to do this.

2) At the start of the animCJK project, we reused work from the remarkable MakeMeAHanzi project that had already been done for Chinese, and which uses the kaisho style.

3) The fonts that were chosen (by the author of the MakeMeAHanzi project) to create the characters are kaisho style fonts (Arphic PL KaitiM GB and Arphic PL UKai fonts).

The advantage of these fonts is that we can use and modify them without having copyright issues.

The downside is that these are fonts made for Chinese only. This is why regarding Japanese (and Korean) many modifications in the character glyphs had to be made in animCJK.

And in Kaisho style, even in Japanese, the radical 糸 is written as we did (this is not the only difference between the Kaisho style and other Japanese styles, but it is by far the most notable).

Note 1: many changes in the order of strokes (and even in the number of strokes) also had to be made in animCJK compared to MakeMeAHanzi for Japanese (and Korean).

Note 2: we also made many changes for Chinese in animCJK compared to MakeMeAHanzi (missing characters, fixing errors, improving character glyphs, etc.)

talutalu commented 8 months ago

Hi, I'm the developer of the Android app around which that discussion started.

I wanted to thank you for your answer and thanks a lot for this project that make it simple to select and animate different parts of a kanji.

Happy new year and I wish you a lot of success for your next projects!

parsimonhi commented 8 months ago

Happy new year too!