different forms of 将, 冷, 直

[MaLaTang]

depending on what text I read, and what website I'm on, certain simplified characters have two forms. Right now I can only think of

将， 冷， 直 but i have come across others too. If you are wondering what the other forms look like, you can copy 将， 冷， 直 and paste them in Google Translate you will see the alternate forms. just wondering why this is...

[renzhe]

Different font?

[Iriya]

Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan all have different standards of writing the characters. So yeah, the same character can look different depending on the font used. You can read more about the regional standards and their implementation in Unicode here.

[bunny87]

ohhh, i know what you mean. i absolutely HATE how 门 can show up as cut in the middle, rather than a little apostrophe floating in the left corner. or 房 shows up with a straight line across the P part, instead of a simple apostrophe on the middle. or 趁 shows up with the 3 scars facing the other way. ugh. stupid iPhone font has to make such ugly edits. and it shows up in Pleco too :'( it confuses me! but it's supposed to be a font thing, as renzhe and iriya mentioned.

[creamyhorror]

This has never bothered me, for some reason. When I started learning Japanese, I was surprised by the different way the characters were rendered at first, but quickly got used to them and started to appreciate the differences between the styles of China, Taiwan/HK and Japan. (Of course, I was already fully used to characters before I started Japanese.)

I don't get confused, since the shapes/components are very distinct and the changes don't cause them to get mixed up. In fact it took me a while to realise there were two common ways to display 喝。 Same with 令 and characters containing it.

The same sort of applies to picking up traditional chars while coming from a simplified background. It just naturally happened without my trying, even though the changes in shapes are far more radical. I'd encourage learners to see shapes as flexible, morphable things - that's how they evolved over the centuries, anyway. That will help you recognise variants.

[MaLaTang]

never even noticed the difference with 喝 until now. so, im thinking that either form can be used when writing or taking tests

[Hofmann]

Depends on how picky the grader is. In my experience, most of them are inconsistent. They're picky about some things (i.e. make you hook on the first stroke of 也) but not very much about others (艹 can be connected or not).

[WestTexas]

量 if it is small will have a diagonal line across the top box, and the 里 on the bottom will look connected to the line below the 日. What do you know, it shows up as such when I am typing here. Wonder if it'll show up as such after I post, let's see...

[Hofmann]

I believe that's stroke reduction, a characteristic of fonts intended for screen use.

You've only got 14 pixels, and 9 horizontal strokes. You can't have white space between all of them, so you'll have to delete some, or make some go another direction. However, this might not be how I'd do it.

[Jose]

This is a result of Han unification. Basically, just as it makes sense to treat 'a' as one character no matter whether it appears in an English word or in any other language using the Latin alphabet, a character like 日 is likewise treated as one numeric code in Unicode no matter whether it appears in Chinese, Japanese or old-style Korean and Vietnamese writing. The problem is that the different approaches to standardisation and simplification of character shapes in the territories where Chinese characters are used have led to a lot of minor differences. The Unicode standard assigns different encoding values to character forms that are clearly different, like say the simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Japanese standard forms of 圖 / 图 / 図 , but there are a lot of grey areas. For example, the Chinese standard form for the 港 character uses 巳, whereas in Japanese it's been standardised with a 己 component. A similar difference occurs between simplified and traditional Chinese in the 起 character, with the simplified standard using 己 and traditional using 巳. Many of these differences are so subtle that they haven't been given separate Unicode values, and which one you see will depend on the font being used. That's why you can't type the two forms of 港 and 起 next to each other, whereas you can type 爲 and 為 together as if they were two different characters.

When a Chinese website specifies a Chinese font like SimSun in its style sheet, the page will be rendered with the normal shapes in simplified Chinese (provided you have that font on your system), but in a site that doesn't specify a font, or in a multi-language site like a Wikipedia article with the odd isolated characters, the browser will simply fall back on a default font if the active font doesn't support that character. If the language of your operating system were simplified Chinese, then the default font for 将, 冷, 直 would be a simplified Chinese font, but if your operating system is in a non-East Asian language, default fonts will not have those characters, and the chosen fallback font can be a traditional Chinese one (where 冷 and 直 are typically rendered in the older conservative style sometimes referred to as 舊字形) or a Japanese font (where 将 has 爫 in the top right corner).

[Iriya]

you can type 爲 and 為 together as if they were two different characters

為 is a 俗字.

[Hofmann]

So is 爲 if you're using SimSun. Three dots point in.