Software to create chinese characters?

[Sonja]

Sorry, dont know where to put my question!

大家好！

Does someone know a software which makes it possible to create a character, so that I can convert it into a Word font? Sorry for my non existing computer skills and my awful english, hope you understand anyway what I mean.

For example, I do have this character written on a han dynasty object, but I cannot find the character in any dictionary. It looks like 㫘, but the two parts has changed its places so that the 日or 曰 part (I guess it must be the ri) is above the bu. Now I have to write the character in a text and dont know how. Using photoshop, writing it myself and put the picture into the text looks stupid, but there must be a software for creating characters or some kind of list with unusual characters, because in the book that intoduces the object, there is also this specific character written like a normal chinese font. If someone knows about such a software or maybe knows the character I tried to explain, please, please let me know! By the way, I have a whole bunch of other characters I need to generate...

Thanks for any help!

Sonja

Thank you all for answering so quickly!

Unfortunately I do not have a photograph of the inscription, only a drawing that looks pretty much as the reading.

the last charcacter as you can see... looks in fact like a normal one, just somehow not existing. maybe it has the same meaning as 㫘, but that would not really make sense regarding the inscription, which gives information about the weight or prize of the object.

Indeed puzzling!

Edited March 4, 2010 at 06:25 PM by Sonja

[chrix]

The easiest way would be to scan it and put it up here.

The IME for traditional has a handwriting recognition function called IME pad, but the only things it could come up with are the following:

罘杲旲

Viel Erfolg

[Daan]

That's a nice puzzle. 昺 昦 are also close but are not what you're looking for. The Unihan database does not seem to contain any characters matching your description under either 曰 (see here) or 日 (see here).

The character on [url=http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=23322&useutf8=falsethis page (which CF can't display as it is too rare) is probably the closest you can get. So apparently the character you describe is not a Unicode character, which means the publisher probably used an in-house font to print that book. Out of curiosity: is a Mandarin pronunciation or a meaning given?

[mikelove]

To actually create brand new Chinese characters in a font, you'd want to use a font editor program like the free open-source FontForge. If you download an open-source Chinese font like Unifont or Droid Sans Fallback, you can use pieces of characters from that (copy-and-pasted) to more easily assemble your own characters - for the character you describe, you could just take 㫘 and then swap the two parts. To make these new characters easy to enter in Word, you'd probably want to create / save them in the "slots" for A-Z, 0-9, punctuation marks, or other very common characters.

Create your character / characters in FontForge, save the resulting font as a TrueType font, install that in your Windows Fonts folder, then select that font in Word and type whatever the appropriate letter / number / etc is for each character to enter it. Note that these characters would only display correctly on a system that had that font installed, though if you save the document as a PDF it should be possible to embed the custom characters from your font in that PDF and easily share it in that form with other people.

This is a lot of work, though - FontForge isn't exactly the easiest program to learn to use - so you might be better off just making a picture of the character you want in Photoshop, even if it doesn't quite look right. One thing that might help with that would be to type in a 㫘 with Photoshop's text input command, then convert the text to an outline (simple command in Photoshop) and rearrange the pieces of that outline - basically the same technique I was describing with FontForge, but with a picture instead of a font file.

[jbradfor]

What chrix said. Could you post a picture? It wouldn't surprise me if it's an existing character, maybe written differently.

[Lugubert]

I was just going to sift through the Mojikyo fonts when I realized that they're only on the computer that died last week, and there's maintenance on the Mojikyo site, so I can't download it here. Anyway, there are lots and lots of strange things in those fonts plus most normal alternatives. When copied into for example WenLin, the more unusual ones often are more or less unpredictably transformed into some standard character.

There may of course exist font + app copies floating around the Internet, but I'll spend time on fixing my dead computer rather than on searching.

And I've absorbed the info on creation possibilities, thanks!

WAIT A MINUTE!

Lots of (rather fun) work, but it should be possible using the parts in a smaller size and positioning them using Insert - Field - Advance (that's what I think the Word menu names are in English). Alt-F9 toggles to/from a code view, which can be useful for editing and correcting distances. A good pdf converter should reproduce the moved parts correctly situated.

Edited March 4, 2010 at 06:42 PM by Lugubert

[889]

You probably have eudcedit.exe on your machine and don't even know it:

http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/course_resources/s02/eudcedit/

[Sonja]

Thank you all for answering so quickly!

Unfortunately I do not have a photograph of the inscription, only a drawing that looks pretty much as the reading.

the last charcacter as you can see... looks in fact like a normal one, just somehow not existing. maybe it has the same meaning as 㫘, but that would not really make sense regarding the inscription, which gives information about the weight or prize of the object.

Indeed puzzling!

[Lugubert]

For the Heidelberg thing, you should note that is Ctrl on English keyboards.

[Daan]

I would say that's almost certain to be an in-house font, given that this is a palaeographic transcription. So you would probably have to create it yourself indeed.

[imron]

you'd probably want to create / save them in the "slots" for A-Z, 0-9, punctuation marks, or other very common characters.

Unicode has a portion set aside for private use, so once you've created your character in something like FontForge you should save it in the private use area. Most Chinese input methods allow you to manually specify mappings from an input string to a Unicode reference point. So for example you could tell the IME to map ribu to the code point of your private character, which would allow you to type it in any windows program and it would display correctly for anyone who had your font installed, or you could embed it in a PDF that you create allowing people to view it without your font.

Like mikelove said, it's a complicated process.

[zhwj]

The Dictionary of Character Variants gives something similar as a variant of 果:

I've used eudcedit for stuff in the past. It's good for things that'll get printed or embedded in print-ready documents, but not so good for sharing editable documents, I've discovered.