Typophile

Chinese Character Identification? Please Help!

annedesigns

Hello typophiles...

Whew, need some help here. Have a client that has offices in China, and I need to recreate a logo using the Chinese characters - and not spend an entire day searching through the glyph palette.

I've used whatthefont.com in the past to identify fonts English fonts... Is there some other kind of website that could "see" the characters in a jpeg so I could copy / paste into my layout?

In the past, I've been able to simply copy / paste characters from supplied Word files or off their website - but there's nothing available for this particular logo (it's a new location).

Any help would be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance, everyone!

nina

Sorry can't help you here (except that I recognize some characters — like the first two that oddly look like 'beauty' and 'country' —, but wouldn't know how to pronounce them).
Though if you can find somebody who reads Chinese, they could just type this out for you. If not here, why not ask on a Chinese forum of some sort?
Good luck!

lunde

Here is the string as Unicode text: 美国方达北京临床研究中心

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

lunde

And, here are the Unicode code points: U+7F8E U+56FD U+65B9 U+8FBE U+5317 U+4EAC U+4E34 U+5E8A U+7814 U+7A76 U+4E2D U+5FC3

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

annedesigns

Lundy - Brilliant! Perfect-o! Thank you so much!

How did you do this?! I'd love to be able to know how in the future.

maxgraphic

I'd imagine because Dr Ken knows these characters. If you didn't, you could use a character dictionary, which traditionally order characters by radical. Most characters are made up of discrete elements, or radicals, of which there are traditionally 216.

Another way of ordering characters is by number of strokes. So you count the strokes (made easier by the rigid rules governing stroke order) and skim through, say, 9-stroke characters.

A newer method is called SKIP and is used in "NTC's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary" by Jack Halpern. It uses a combination of patterns and stroke count to look up characters and generally works well.

Incidentally, "Beautiful Country" is America. But don't feel too flattered: "beauty" sounds similar to the ME in aMErica. It's a phonetic association.

lunde

The string is Simplified Chinese, meaning that only Simplified Chinese fonts will be able to render all of the glyphs. In particular, U+4E34 (临) is not present in Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts.

As to how I entered the ideographs, it sort of helps to be the author of this tome: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514471/

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

annedesigns

Mr. Lunde, Maxgraphic -

Please accept my apologies for my obvious lack of knowledge and understanding of this clearly very specialized practice. I sincerely appreciate your helpfulness and patience with my inquiry. This has been a most enlightening post!

lunde

No worries, and no need for any apologies. The world of ideographs, in particular how they're handled in digital environments, is quite intriguing, and it is easy to become consumed by it (which clearly happened to me).

Dr. Ken Lunde
Senior Computer Scientist, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com

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