Hi Alex!


Another one of your good questions!


1) You refer to the character JJA, (zhe1, those, he who). but I always had problems with the delineation of the shapes of this character. I see it with the shapes GH A! Till the day I found the font ¡§li¡¨ which clearly shows it as JKA. I should have written, to be more precise: ¡§ ¡Kthe designer of CJ most probably saw this character as designed on the font ¡§li¡¨¡K¡¨. In fact, Michelle Shen, the keeper of the method, and other Chinese CangJie friends, never had problems with the signs JK in this character. I don¡¦t think I wrote that the inventor saw the characters (plural) through that font 2


¡§li¡¨. That was a good font to illustrate this code.




2) Unfortunately, there is no to my knowledge, a font that could be used as a perfect model for all the CJ codes. I stated that ¡§We CALL ¡§model style¡¨ the style that serves as a model for the code ¡K.¡¨. And if you brows even superficially through the Appendix I, you will see that ¡§the model style¡¨ changes fonts quite often! I once asked the question to Michelle Shen. She confirmed that some characters, many of them listed and explained in Appendix I, had actually various ways to be written, and that each way was as standard as the other, or so, depending the mood of the writer or printer, or font designer. To cover all these double shapes for one character, you need to have a database of 20000 to 30000 characters. The Big5 system cannot support this. But, as pointed out in note 1 page 230 of the CJ book, the Dragon system can. The Ebook palmtop soon to be released by Chu¡¦s company, ( http://www.culturecom.com.hk/eng/index.html ) contains now 35000 characters (generated, not in a database).


I hope some one reading this forum will be able to recommend a ¡§perfect font¡¨ ! I will be the first interested. Yes, it will be good, for learning purposes, to have a PERFECT geometrical font, but I am afraid it does not exist, because, (remember page 44 note 6), the Cang Jie ¡§CJ signs are flexible shapes ¡K like archetypes of character shapes. They must be adjusted to match the actual character shapes¡¨. Cases where matching signs and character shapes is difficult are rare, and most of them documented in the CJ book. If you find more, please tell us. (So far, the font I found matches best CangJie signs shapes is the Ming type of fonts. But I think the shape connection is pretty clear also with Kai and Hei type of fonts).


Eddy

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Replying to:

Hi everybody!




On page 100 in the CJ-book (ŽÒ as an example), it is described that the inventors of CJ saw characters in the "Li"-Style. It is also stated in Appendix I, that there are model characters from which CJ codes where derived.




Now I'm searching for a font, which displays characters according to above mentioned rules.




Although I bought the HK 196 Dynalab-Fonts, I haven't found any font perfectly suiting to this problem up to now.




Does anybody know, whether such a font is available at all? It must be a Unicode-based font (including HK characters), able to be run on an English(German)-based Windows 2000 machine.




The font doesn't need to be especially pretty, just good enough for learning purposes.




Thanks a lot in advance!


Alex