skishore / makemeahanzi

Free, open-source Chinese character data
https://www.skishore.me/makemeahanzi/
Other
1.83k stars 465 forks source link

About 再 stroke order (again) and comparison between a simplified Chinese context and a traditional Chinese context #62

Open parsimonhi opened 5 years ago

parsimonhi commented 5 years ago

Sorry to open again a closed issue (see issue #51).

In a simplified Chinese context, in 再 (as many others such as 冉鞲遘 etc.) the vertical stroke should be drawn 4th and horizontal stroke 5th. See for instance:

bihua.51240.com archchinese.com

In a traditional Chinese context, the horizontal stroke is drawn before the vertical one. See for instance:

http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw/character.do

Note that archchinese.com (which is displaying both simplified and traditional Chinese) is not always consistent for characters that contain this component. Some of them have the horizontal stroke drawn before the vertical one (especially those that are not simplified characters such as 購).

As a result, in makemeahanzi, i think that the vertical stroke should be written before the horizontal one since it assumes using a simplified Chinese context.

What is a simplified Chinese context or a traditional Chinese is a difficult subject. Roughly, when the html lang attribute is "zh-hans" or "zh-cn" or "zh-sg", this is a simplified Chinese context. Otherwise, this is a traditional Chinese context, excepting when the lang attribute is just "zh": in such a case, the question is open :-) (otherwise, it should be too simple).

What happens when one want to draw a traditional character in a simplified context (or a simplified character in a traditional context) is another burden. It seems that in such a case, most of the time (i am still researching what is really done most of the time), the traditional character may be "modified" and get a simplified-like stroke order (i.e. vertical stroke before horizontal one for 4th and 5th strokes of 再 when it appears as a component of a traditional character). See for instance https://bihua.51240.com/e8b3bc__bihuachaxun/ for 購 character.

Also, the traditional character may have two different glyphs: one in a simplified Chinese context and another one in a traditional Chinese context (such as characters that contain the 艹 (艸) component). For instance, 莧 (decimal unicode 33703) is a traditional character. It ha a simplified form: 苋 (decimal unicode 33483). When 莧 is drawn in a traditional context, the 艹 has (most of the time?) 4 strokes. But when it is drawn in a simplified context, it has (most of the time?) only 3 strokes, even when one uses the traditional character. You can test it using for instance the noto font, and displaying a html page containing <div lang="zh-hans">莧</div> and <div lang="zh-hant">莧</div>.

Finally, note that even people from mainland China, in a simplified Chinese context, draw the horizontal stroke before the vertical one as the 4th stroke of 再. I just tested "again" :-) that point with some Chinese relatives at home 10mn ago.

Hope it helps!