Build your own character?

[Lu]

I tried, it's text and it can be copied, but copying results in 女宰 again. They apparently shrunk & stretched two characters to make it look like that one. But thank you for searching. How did you find this document?

I searched some more with 韓山劉 墓, and am finding more websites that write 女宰 as a solution, and one that may have tried to write it, but I only see a 口. I think I'll give up now and find another solution.

[skylee]

I don't exactly remember, but I probably found it by searching 韓山劉 on baidu.

Have you tried using word to create it? I think it (the method I posted above) is not difficult, as the shape of this character is simple.

[OneEye]

I made this in about 45 seconds on GlyphWiki. I didn't go through the process of saving it or anything, but I did a screen capture, so maybe you could just paste in the image.

女宰.tiff

[skylee]

Strangest thing. I thought tiff files were common, but none of the programmes in my cell can open it.

 

The character in the tiff file looks ok.

 

Not sure if this is a viable solution. If you adjust the width of 女宰 to 50% (or 40%+60%) of the normal size (word > font > character spacing > scale) without changing the width of the other characters, they almost look like a single character.  But of course in character count they are counted as two. Hope this helps.

[Lu]

Thank you Skylee and OneEye! That tiff looks good, and if making it took you less than a minute, I can probably learn to do it without much trouble if the need arises. Just using Word, as the doc Skylee found did, would probably be even easier for use in a normal document or a pdf, but this will be a searchable website so not sure if it works for that.

 

A little background on all this: a publisher is working on digitalising a number of Chinese reference works, including a biographical dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin. The whole book got scanned, but a lot of characters came out wrong, and I am currently working on correcting them in the digital file. Mostly this is very easy, occasionally this takes some searching. Through this thread I've learned about three new ways to find the weird characters, which has been really useful (and it's quite cool to actually find them).

 

I hadn't tried making this character yet, my plan is to first finish the whole thing (I'm about halfway now) and then discuss with the publisher's technical guy what to do with the impossible ones (one, so far).

[imron]

but this will be a searchable website so not sure if it works for that.

If the character is not in Unicode, you will not be able to search for it either, so it's a moot point what non-Unicode method you use.  From a technical perspective, the picture would be the easier solution.  If I was doing it, I'd probably have the text 女宰 on the webpage, and then css to make the text invisible and have a picture of the combined characters covering it.

 

That way people can still search for the text 女宰, but on the page it still looks like a proper character.

[Lu]

 

If I was doing it, I'd probably have the text 女宰 on the webpage, and then css to make the text invisible and have a picture of the combined characters covering it.

Imron: that sounds like a good idea, I'll suggest that to the technical guy.

 

Another one, if anyone wants to look: 黑日, in one character, pronounced 'da'. The given name of one Pu Da, whose entry reads 'As a surrendered king of the Xiongnu 匈奴, Pu Da was ennobled, probably with the title of Yi hou 易侯, in 147, dying without issue in 144.'

 

On Unicode I found 䵣, pronounced dá, but the character in the book very clearly uses 日 not 旦. Googled 左黑右日, no luck. Googled 黑日, found a lot of Japanese websites that were no help. Googled 易侯僕, and found a number of websites using different characters, misspelling this character, describing the character or trying to write it but the character doesn't show up for me. Tried the ctext-dictionary, according to them 䵣 is the right character after all for this man. I'll ask an expert on characters or the man who made the book himself, unless someone here manages to find it.

[OneEye]

Looks like ctext is right, it should be 䵣. The 教育部異體字字典 doesn't have a 黑+日 character, but one variant has 口 over 一, which is a variant of 旦, and might get confused with 日 if it isn't written well or printed well, or if the lighting is bad when the author read that character, or who knows. 

[smartmandarin]

I strongly recommend "yellow bridge".

Just go to yellowbridge.com

type in the character then it will show you both simplified and traditional character.

Also will give you the meaning of the radicals..

It helps lots of my students, hope that helps you too!

[skylee]

Re #29, if only smartmandarin can show us how to "type in the character" of 左女右宰, or that of 左黑右日 ...

[smartmandarin]

Re # 30

 

download "google pinyin" to your computer, then you can type in Chinese.

hope i'm not misunderstanding your post 

[skylee]

Re #31, I have google pinyin installed in all my computers and also my cell phone.  But I can't type the character which has 女 on the left and 宰 on the right. I also don't know how to type the character with 黑 on the left and 日 on the right. Could smartmandarin show me how to type them? These are what is discussed on this thread.

[OneEye]

I wonder if "smartmandarin" has even bothered to read the post she's commenting on.

[imron]

Came across this today:

 

http://glyphrstudio.com/

 

It seems potentially useful, although I've not used it, so can't vouch for how good it is.