Printing Chinese characters

Belloc28 October 2012 · 16:42

"While there are lists of official simplifications published by the PRC, most of these are obtained by applying a few general principles to specific areas. In particular, there is a set of radicals (such as U+2F94 ⾔ kangxi radical speech, U+2F99 ⾙ kangxi radical shell, U+2FA8 ⾨ kangxi radical gate, and U+2FC3 ⿃ kangxi radical bird) for which simplifications exist (U+2EC8 ⻈ cjk radical c-simplified speech, U+2EC9 ⻉ cjk radical c-simplified shell, U+2ED4 ⻔ cjk radical c-simplified gate, and U+2EE6 ⻦ cjk radical c-simplified bird). The basic technique for simplifying a character containing one of these radicals is to substitute the simplified radical, as in the previous example."

This was obtained from page 399 of Chapter 12 : East Asian Scripts from "The Unicode Standard".

I tried to print the above mentioned Unicode characters in MS Word, using the technique of typing the character code in hexadecimal followed by the keys Alt + 'x', to no avail. I don't know why, but there are certain situations where Word doesn't try to find a suitable font to print a character with this method, and this is exactly one of those cases. Then I found out that if I explicitly select the Meiryo UI font, I'm able to print the character codes U+2F94, U+2F99, U+2FA8 and U+2FC3. But I couldn't find a way to render the other characters, U+2EC8, U+2EC9, U+2ED4 and U+2EE6, after trying with every available Chinese and Japanese fonts in Windows 7. Any suggestions on how to print these characters ?

Jabez28 October 2012 · 22:44

Do you have FangSong, SimHei or KaiTi installed? Based on this list of fonts supplied with Windows 7, these are the ones I'd expect to have those simplified chinese radicals.

Nick Curtis29 October 2012 · 03:23

Well, for sure the simplified radicals do not ship with Georgia…

Belloc29 October 2012 · 03:46

jabez

Thanks for your reply. I wasn't able to print the characters with those fonts. See this link.

PS: There seems to be a bug here. When I try to test the link above within the "Preview" window, I'm sent to CreateWiki - Typophile !

This should link to the .docx file in SkyDrive, where I tried to render the above mentioned characters in MS Word 2010.

Here is the link : https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=6019F0C631440ED5!137&authkey=!AN9BeQaN-ZPR95Y.

Belloc29 October 2012 · 03:41

>>Well, for sure the simplified radicals do not ship with Georgia…<<

and so ?

Nick Curtis29 October 2012 · 05:55

It was noted elsewhere that secure HTTP links don’t work here, so ditch the /s/ in https…

David W. Goodrich29 October 2012 · 08:10

If you go to Unicode.org and type in your codes, they will tell you that U+2EC8, U+2EC9, U+2ED4 and U+2EE6 fall in the CJK Radicals Supplement. I don't recall when that was added, but I'm not surprised those characters are missing from most CJK fonts. They are available with some of the Chinese fonts Adobe bundles with their software.

David

Belloc29 October 2012 · 08:46

David W. Goodrich

That's what I've just found out, and as a matter of fact, I was about to show my findings here, when I saw your post. If you look at this Wikipedia site, you'll see that the CJK Radicals Supplement didn't have those characters, at least until Unicode 6.1, inclusive. So my interpretation is that the fonts have not yet being updated with these latest characters, as Unicode 6.1 was released last March 31.

Thanks for your reply

Belloc29 October 2012 · 08:57

oldnick

It worked beautifully. As we say in Brazil, "living and learning".

Thanks

David W. Goodrich4 November 2012 · 21:22

(Sorry to be slow, but power was restored only recently to my part of New Haven.)

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for CJK fonts to be updated; one of the challenges indealing with CJK text is that fonts often differ in the number of characters they include. The CJK Radicals Supplement is a case in point: I'm pretty sure those were added to Unicode years ago, but as you discovered few fonts have them.

David

Jabez4 November 2012 · 22:10

Downloaded your file, Belloc.

David's correct. These worked for me.
Adobe Fangsong Std R
Adobe Heiti Std R
Adobe Kaiti Std R
Adobe Song Std L

Belloc5 November 2012 · 13:43

Hi jabez

Many thanks for your suggestions

Regards

ahyangyi13 November 2012 · 11:03

jabez, these Adobe fonts look wonderful! However, I think these characters look exactly like 讠 (u+8BA0),贝 (u+8D1D),门 (u+95E8), and 鸟 (u+9E1F). So maybe just using these characters in your current font is better than using the corresponding glyphs in the Adobe fonts.

By the way, we should have looked at www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2E80.pdf. Most of the radicals have corresponding CJK characters.

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