PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Printable Version

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Printable Version

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PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - KANJI - 2006-10-19

Pangolin, you're over my head about computing, buddy, but I can imagine the end result. I'm disappointed to hear that digital primitives wouldn't be useful for you. But your post inspired me! Maybe there might be a font pro in my local community who could do this within a certain budget. I hadn't thought about that before.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-10-20

ファブリス Wrote:Bitmaps are resolution dependent. I would suggest to use the radicals found in chinese fonts, using the unicode website to find the radicals, and then stack them in a vector program like Illustrator. Then they can be resized, parts can be masked/clipped and if necessary missing bits can be added, all in vector mode. Then you can output bitmaps from that in any resolution.

Not sure if this is directed at me, but as I mentioned bitmaps, I expect it is.

In TTF creation with Fontographer the bit map is only a stage in the process. The bitmap is imported into the program which then traces it to create a vector graphics object. The bitmap template is then discarded. The resulting object is usually extremely good, but you can tweak the Bezier curves to your heart's content. The result is a scalable TrueType Font.

This is the standard method with Fontographer, although you could import a font and edit the vectors. I don't know about you, but I find working directly with vector graphics extremely tricky and frustrating, so doing the spade work in raster (bitmap) graphics in Photoshop is the best solution for me.

KANJI Wrote:Pangolin, you're over my head about computing, buddy, but I can imagine the end result. I'm disappointed to hear that digital primitives wouldn't be useful for you. But your post inspired me! Maybe there might be a font pro in my local community who could do this within a certain budget. I hadn't thought about that before.

I have a lot of time off due in the next month or two, let me see how I get on. Perhaps I could send you an incomplete version for you to try and see what you think. You may also have some suggestions to make.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - KANJI - 2006-10-21

Pangolin, you made a very kind offer. Thank you. I wish I didn't have to work so I could concentrate on RTK. But I find it's a good hobby. For this reason, memory becomes even more important. If you take a long absence from RTK, then sudddenly come back, quickly being able to piece things together would be very helpful. That's where a good set of notes detailing the pieces--the primitives, etc.--can bridge the gaps. Aloha.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-11-01

This is primarily directed at KANJI, but of course anyone else who is interested is welcome to download and evaluate.

The font I am creating of RTK1 primitives is about half complete and I thought this would be a good point to let others have a look at it. I have simply assigned the primitives in the order they appear in the RTK1 index* to the printable codes of the standard Windows font map, starting with "!" (ASCII code 33).

Included in the zip package is a very simple Excel spreadsheet listing the characters in one column and the keyboard character you need to type to enter the character. I have put the Windows "Alt+numeric pad" code for characters outside of the scope of the directly keyable range. Install the font before opening the spreadsheet.

The font is Windows TTF, I believe I can easily create a Mac version if anyone requires this. I have modestly entitled it "Pangolin".

http://www.transient.eclipse.co.uk/Pangolin_font.zip

(* I have added a few variants not included in the index.)

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - colonel32 - 2006-11-01

Looks excellent. And it seems to work fine OS X (10.4.8 PPC) without you needing to change it.

Pangolin sounds like it was meant to be the name of a font!

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-11-01

colonel32 Wrote:Looks excellent. And it seems to work fine OS X (10.4.8 PPC) without you needing to change it.

Oh that's interesting. マックについては、何も知らないんです。

colonel32 Wrote:Pangolin sounds like it was meant to be the name of a font!

Yes, it really does doesn't it? It probably already is! And anyway, Pangolin isn't my real name ^_~

Thanks for the positive comments.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - KANJI - 2006-11-02

Pangolin, I just noticed your post with the sample primitive font. It's been here for a week? Sorry for not noticing it earlier. It's excellent. Right you are for naming it after yourself, ha, ha. A lot of creativity and hard work went into that.

The characters did not appear in my Excel but they did for the .TTF file. I'm running a MAC OSX. Wait a minute, now I know. I need to install the font for it to appear in Excell, right?

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-11-02

KANJI Wrote:Pangolin, I just noticed your post with the sample primitive font. It's been here for a week? Sorry for not noticing it earlier. It's excellent. Right you are for naming it after yourself, ha, ha. A lot of creativity and hard work went into that.

The characters did not appear in my Excel but they did for the .TTF file. I'm running a MAC OSX. Wait a minute, now I know. I need to install the font for it to appear in Excell, right?

I only posted it the day before your reply. And yes, the font will have to be installed for it to available in Excel! It's interesting that both people who have seen it so far use Macs, and I didn't even think it would work on Mac! As I said, I know nothing about Mac, and I thought they needed a different version of the font.

I expect it will take another couple of weeks to add the rest of the primitives. At that point it might be worth considering adding the primitives that are also kanji (these don't appear in the RTK1 index of primitives). I have in fact added one, in random fashion for some reason: "kihen" tree/wood as it appears on the left. Perhaps of those that are kanji in their own right, only the ones (such as "kihen") that have a different enough primitive form should be added.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-11-03

CharleyGarrett Wrote:This sort of fits into my project to learn the 214 traditional radicals, with their japanese names. I have the spreadsheet, and it is mostly identical to the little chart in the back of the KKLD, but there are some variations of kanji (like kihen) that aren't part of the font that I have. Could you include things like that? For me?

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm definitely considering adding any other primitives that aren't in the index of RTK1 (which is my starting point). I already added kihen, kind of on a whim, after adding the 木 variation "pole". It seemed kind of odd to have "pole" (as in 茶) and not "kihen" (as in 机).

I don't see any reason to stop there, but I'd like to add the rest of the indexed primitives first. I have 100 odd left to add. When this is done I will then go through RTK1 and look at the kanji-in-their-own-right primitives. Although these are available in any font, being full kanji, I feel it would be nice to add them in primitive form, and even their variations, where they exist. It would also have the aesthetic advantage of having them all in the same style, and the practical one of all being in the same font. I'm not sure how much work that would involve at this stage, however.

Also, I have not given much thought to coding (positions of characters within the font) because I don't think that any one rationale is better than any other. If anyone has any bright ideas, please let me know. It is not too difficult to move the characters around in the font.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - CharleyGarrett - 2006-11-03

This sort of fits into my project to learn the 214 traditional radicals, with their japanese names. I have the spreadsheet, and it is mostly identical to the little chart in the back of the KKLD, but there are some variations of kanji (like kihen) that aren't part of the font that I have. Could you include things like that? For me?

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-12-03

Well, the "Pangolin" font of Heisig primitives has reached beta stage (I skipped alpha). That means all the primitives are in there, plus a few extra variants I threw in, a total of 236 characters.

http://www.transient.eclipse.co.uk/Pangolin_font.zip

I will repeat what I said earlier to save you looking for the post:

I have simply assigned the primitives in the order they appear in the RTK1 index to the printable codes of the standard Windows font map, starting with "!" (ASCII code 33).

Included in the zip package is a very simple Excel spreadsheet listing the characters in one column and the keyboard character you need to type to enter the character. I have put the Windows "Alt+numeric pad" code for characters outside of the scope of the directly keyable range, and beyond that I have put the hex unicode ("U+"). Install the font before opening the spreadsheet.

Any bug reports, comments or suggestions - for example if there are any particular variants that you would like added - are welcome.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - KANJI - 2006-12-04

Bravo! I look forward to using them!

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - colonel32 - 2006-12-04

It's looking great!

Just a quick gotcha on OS X: every time you reinstall a updated version of the font, you must first open the Font Book, Ctrl+Click on Pangolin, and select Remove "Pangolin" Family. Then install by double-clicking on the pangolin.ttf file, then clicking on the Install Font button on the window that pops up.

If you don't remove it first, none of the changes will show up and you'll still have the old version.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Pangolin - 2006-12-04

colonel32 Wrote:If you don't remove it first, none of the changes will show up and you'll still have the old version.

Thanks colonel32, I don't have access to a Mac, in fact I've never used one! Windows asks you to remove previous versions of fonts before it lets you re-install, so that can't happen on a gatesmachine.

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - colonel32 - 2006-12-14

Pangolin Wrote:I made bit-mapped images from a generic Japanese "text book" font (the type used in the stroke order diagrams in RTK1) and, unless the primitive was already a character in it's own right, I erased the unwanted portions of the character

What's the name of that generic font?

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - cangy - 2006-12-17

ファブリス Wrote:I would suggest to use the radicals found in chinese fonts, using the unicode website to find the radicals, and then stack them in a vector program like Illustrator.

Great idea! Pitty the radicals aren't combining characters in unicode (AFAIK) or there'd be no need to externally create new glyphs (provided all the primitives can be constructed by superimposing radicals that is...)

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - raulir - 2006-12-18

Radicals aren't combining characters in Unicode, but it does allow description. See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch11.pdf section "Ideographic Description: U+2FF0-U+2FFB". The pictures will give you a quick idea. Quick excerpts:

"A user wishing to represent an unencoded ideograph will need to analyze its structure to determine how to describe it using an Ideographic Description Sequence."

"In particular, Ideographic Description Sequences are not to be used to provide alternative graphic representations of encoded ideographs. Searching, collation, and other content-based text operations would then fail."

"An implementation may render a valid Ideographic Description Sequence either by rendering the individual characters separately or by parsing the Ideographic Description Sequence and drawing the ideograph so described."

"Implementations of the Unicode Standard may choose to parse Ideographic Description Sequences when calculating word and character boundaries, but such a decision will make the algorithms involved significantly more complicated and slower."

So you can't really blame Unicode here, they're doing as much as they can :-) The rest is up to the implementations. You will find that even "rendering the individual characters separately" doesn't work everywhere, as many fonts don't have these characters. (Test your browser: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ideographic_description_characters.html ).

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - Hint666 - 2012-04-07

i created spreadsheet with primitives but some of them are missing... If someone can help that would be great
http://speedy.sh/Z8Eqq/PRYMITIWES.ods

PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS - kintopp - 2014-08-29

When were expanding the list of radicals (http://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/) on the Kanji alive website we found that not all variants were encoded in Unicode so we set out to create our own (web) font.

The completed font, called "Japanese Radicals" is now freely available via https://github.com/kintopp/Kanji-alive/releases/latest for private or commercial use. We hope it'll be useful to others as well! The font directory also includes a PDF and .csv file with all the radicals, their meanings, readings and (where appropriate) positions.