Build your own character?

[Lu]

Does anyone know of a website or a tool that can be used to compose characters (out of radicals and such) that are so rare that they can't be typed? I need to type some very, very old names. In most cases that just takes me to the very end of the character input row, occasionally I need to try and find it in Unicode, but so far I've come across one instance where even Unicode doesn't know it. That character is 帶 on top of 足 and is pronounced dai (tone not indicated), if anyone wants to try.

[skylee]

Take a look -> http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&char=%E4%A0%A0

Found it by searching 上帶下足.

[Demian]

Esteemed sire, may I be so audicious to put forward a humble suggestion to bring to your attention to an input method of our blessed, sagacious forefathers - from a time when people considered it normal to undergo a six-month course to use a computer - Cangjie? ;)

 

Here is how you can input your uncommon and obscure characters with Cangjie:

 

帶 = http://input.foruto.com/cjdict/45409.php

足 = http://input.foruto.com/cjdict/43180.php

 

Cangjie is an alternative method to input Chinese characters. It is based on the form of characters. It takes less than five keystrokes to input even the most complicated character.

[Lu]

Esteemed lady, thanks for the suggestion; the problem was not that I didn't know how to input the character, but that my input system didn't know it. Did you actually manage to type said character with Cangjie? I'll look into Cangjie, if it can be learned in an amount of time significantly more reasonable than 6 months it could be good to learn it.

 

Skylee, you're a hero. Thanks for the suggestion of both dictionary and way of searching.

 

Meanwhile, I seem to recall reading once, somewhere (here? Sinosplice?) about a way to make characters yourself. If anyone has any idea how to do that, I remain interested.

[skylee]

See if this helps -> Windows 7 造字程式

[imron]

Interestingly, that character is in Unicode, and is also in the basic multilingual plane, meaning it's not that rare.

 

Regarding building your own characters, I believe John from Sinosplice just does that in Photoshop.

 

If you want to be able to use the characters in an actual document or something, and treat it just as normal text you will need to use a font creator to create a new character inside an existing font.  Unicode has a block of characters reserved for 'private use', so you create your own characters in the font creator and assign them to the private use area.

 

Then you can configure your IME to output that specific unicode character based on a certain set of keystrokes.

 

It's a bit of a complicated process, and other people won't be able to see that character unless they also have your special font.

[OneEye]

There's also this site. I haven't done much with it other than making characters in the sandbox, but it looks like after you design your character(s), you can create a font containing them. Of course, like imron said, other people won't be able to see it unless they have your font. I'm writing two papers on excavated texts, which will require characters that don't exist in Unicode. I was planning on just using images of the characters in question, but this may be better.

[skylee]

It's a bit of a complicated process, and other people won't be able to see that character unless they also have your special font.

 

 

What if the document is converted to a pdf? I expect that as an image people can see it, no?

 

It seems to me that what people usually do is to insert a jpg of the rare character in the document.

[imron]

It depends on the PDF, and whether the creator of the PDF decided to embed fonts.  However, not all PDF converters will embed fonts (depending on the font), as there are legal issues regarding copyright - it depends on the font and how you have configured the PDF converter.

 

Inserting a JPG is one workaround, but it can be tedious plus it tends to stand out as obviously different from the surrounding characters, not to mention you have issues if you want to increase font sizes, cut/paste etc.

There are many benefits to creating custom characters once you get over the difficulty in creating them.  Also, a lot of the difficulties stem from a high learning curve, so once you've got that out of the way for the first one or two characters, it becomes much easier for any subsequent ones.

[skylee]

Scanned as pdf?  It should work. 

[imron]

Yes, but the resulting file size will be significantly larger, not to mention it won't print as crisply.

 

There are always ways around such things, but each choice has tradeoffs.  Depending on what's important for you, one solution will be appropriate in one situation, and another solution in another situation.

[Lu]

Thanks everyone for the information! Looks like I won't need to build this particular character, but it might still come in handy at some later point.

[Pingfa]

http://www.nciku.com/

[arrow]

My way of inputing that kind of characters is to use ime pad, with which you simply handwrite them and let the OCR system choose characters for you.

Another option is, if you are confident about your stroke orders, use Google Pinyin, type u and input strokes one by one, luckily enough you'll get what you want.

It is also handy to use software at http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html to search characters, I find myself occasionally saved by it.

[Lu]

If anyone is interested, I've come across another one. I searched far and wide and when I searched 上鹵下木，which is almost what it looks like, I found this. It's this character. But there are no answers. It's pronounced Li, and is the surname of 栗姬 (who is usually written with this more managable character), one of the wives of emperor 景 of the 漢. I tried handwriting in Pleco: no luck. Wikipedia: no luck. The full-text 史記 itself: something didn't work about the search, and besides there must be an easier way. Then tried googling, and found that others have tried and failed to find a way to type it, and that's when I gave up.

[skylee]

Which one is it -> http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/yitia/fra/fra01920.htm

 

This one?

[skylee]

 This one? -> http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&char=%E3%AE%9A

 

PS - I simply searchd 栗 on this webpage and there are many variants listed in the result.

[Lu]

 

This one? -> http://ctext.org/dic...pl?if=gb&char=㮚

Yes. Yes, that one. OMG you actually found it and it can indeed be typed. Thanks once again, for both the character and the tip about how to find them.

[Lu]

Another one, if someone is interested in giving this a shot: 女宰, but in one character. The book suggests it's pronounced 'zai', but isn't sure. The description of the person of this name, 劉[女宰], is only 'A seal engraved with this name was found among the furnishings of a tomb of early Former Han date near Xuzhou 徐州', so this is not even a famous person.

 

I searched under 'zai' in Unicode, but no luck. Googled for 左女右宰, nothing. Just 女宰 turned up a lot of websites, but mostly about women killing something, so that was no use. Tried a radical search in the ctext.org dictionary Skylee recommended, didn't find it. I'm tempted to give up, but thought I'd ask here first. Thanks for any pointers!

[skylee]

I find the character at the bottom of page 4 of this document but it is probably an image as you can't copy and paste it -> http://wenku.baidu.com/link?url=Hkyt3rBcKPbUERLwfqyq22HIeTM2qJunkmBgm26-Dl3FgIprmmDJ0d0xdnLAPJqLtZlSXLxdsAytdm4xF0z6xnbKeWGc_x7jT8DdJPxUW7i