Wednesday, 18 September 2013

250 Essential Kanji for Everyday Use, Bk1


Book 1 of the Tuttle series "250 Essential Kanji" has the oddity ( in my edition ) of not only having no Unicode value for a kanji but also no Tuttle flashcard number.

Take page 121, for example.

The kanji are entries 139, 140 and 141.

These are 証 確 and .

Their Tuttle flashcard numbers are 754, 805 and 978.

If you are interested in an Android app to accompany the book, drop a note at info AT aule-browser.com and I'll convert some Curl RIA desktop code into Curl CAEDE code and we'll have that app.

The app would show you that these kanji are

証  ショウ / あかし  8A3C
確  カク·コウ / たし.か·たし.かめる  78BA
認  ニン / みと.める·したた.める  8A8D

If you know the 4-character Unicode utf-16 value then I have a simple app that gives you a version of that kanji that you can then cut-n-paste into a web page, a URL address or a Word document – or into a Find field in a Japanese page that is encoded in EUC or Shift or which ever JIS or other encoding is confounding your search. One ring of code to bind them all.

Btw, their Kodansha Essential Kanji entries are 1672, 1409 and 1690.

And which two of the above kanji form the verb kakuninsuru ?  Sooo desu ne !




Saturday, 24 August 2013

kana kanji font フォント


I am searching diligently for a Japanese Unicode web font ( フォント ) with fine ( light or extra-light ) kana (hiragana, katakana and furigana) but strongly stroked kanji so that in a phrase with only few kanji, the effect will be one of the kanji characters standing out.

The alternative is to use extensive markup or to script based on the binary value of the characters.

What approach will I take for web languages which have string types or values, but no char type?







Sunday, 18 August 2013

katakana and hiragana charts PNG


I have placed two Japanese kana chart images at aule-browser.com/nihongo :

aule-browser.com/nihongo/images/hiragana-rs-72pt-1280-960.png

and

aule-browser.com/nihongo/images/katakana-rs-72pt-1280-960.png

which were both created using an easy to edit script in the Curl web content language ( formerly MIT Curl before being marketted by Curl Corp and now maintained in Version 8 by SCSK of Tokyo.)

The font in this case is 72pt HanaMinA in navy blue on a cornsilk background.

The same basic charts in Meiryo font can be seen at

aule-browser.com/nihongo/images/hiragana-rs-72pt-1280-960-meiryo.png

and

aule-browser.com/nihongo/images/katakana-rs-72pt-1280-960-meiryo.png

The Curl macros used are simply table, row and cell as in

  {table 
         {row {cell A} {cell B} {cell C} ... }
         {row {cell J} {cell K} {cell L} ... }
         ...
  }

A few blank cells were used for alignment where no character exists in a given column and are merely

   {cell \ }

The slash + space gives us a space character rather like a non-breaking blank in HTML.