I'm talking about getting just the primitive elements into an excel spreadsheet? I'm finding it's impossible no matter what I do. I tried scanning the index of signal primitives from RTK2 into a pdf, OCR'ing it, then copying and pasting into excel but the actual primitives (parts of kanji) don't show up in excel, they just appear as weird symbols.

I tried using bitmap to erase the part of the kanji I don't want and using the picture as the signal primitive but that doesn't work either.

For now I have to use full kanji to represent just the primitive but that's annoying.

Do I need to install a special font on my computer in order to reproduce just the primitives?

this is all the radicals: http://www.efontshop.com/feaddfont/help/busyu_list.htm

a lot of the other parts don't have "real" names or are really obscure

This isn't an excel file, but somebody made an anki deck for all of the RTK primitives with heisigs names for them. As I recall, I don't believe you use anki, so if you absolutely need an excel file, you could export a csv into excel and hack something together from that.

There's also the pangolin font that somebody from this site made that contains all of the RTK primitives.

The difference between this and what z1bbo posted is that, as he mentioned, some RTK primitives aren't actually radicals, so won't be included in the font. Pangolin's font and nevdelap's anki deck contain all of RTK's primitives including the non-radical ones.

z1bbo Wrote:this is all the radicals: http://www.efontshop.com/feaddfont/help/busyu_list.htm

a lot of the other parts don't have "real" names or are really obscure

Thanks very much.