Successfully did a graphic edit on kanji but can't do it again. I highlighted a kanji 腹 from its display page here, copied and pasted into MS Word; then copied it there and pasted into Photoshop. There I edited it by extracting a primitive and then pasting it into MS Word.

Mysterious because I can't do the above again. Once into Photoshop the same kanji becomes gibberish. This happened on separate days. I believe originally that MS Word needed to be middleman for some reason. Well actually I do know. Without MS Word, going directly to Photoshop from this website resulted in nothing. Nothing appeared in the Photoshop window after I tried to paste the kanji there.

Of course, I can successfully edit these kanji by changing a MS Word document into a pdf and then opening that into Photoshop. But that is laborious compared to what I accidentally did originally. Got any ideas how to explain the mystery?

If you copy text from Word and paste into Photoshop you get a bitmap image of the text (unless you paste into a PS Text Tool box) which as you say can be edited as an image.

However, with something like kanji you need to make sure that the font that is set in Word is explicitly an Asian font before copying. Kanji will still display in Word when pasted in even if the font is set to Arial/Helvetica (for example) but Photoshop isn't so smart with fonts and it will probably just show question marks or some other gibberish, or nothing at all.

So check the font that Word is set to before copying, making sure it is Mincho or another Asian font. If you do that then it should work.

By the way, I am still working on the Pangolin Heisig primitive font. I am up to the 7 stroke primitives so far (over 180 primitives entered), and I will be doing as much as I can to finish it over the next 4 days, as I have time off. このスペースを見てください！

Pangolin, you wizard, you! Absolutely correct though you knew that already. I was pretty confounded by it all. Let me say there was only one difference--the Osaka font did it for me, maybe because I am running MAC. (Could be that Photoshop was "registered" to use Japanese on my computer by Osaka.)

Thanks again and we look forward to your new font.

You could also just do a screen capture and then paste the screen into Photoshop and crop it. On Windows you can do a screen capture by pressing Print Screen but there's probably a simple way on Mac too.

That's useful info, thanks.