Searching CJK font for character component

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akerbeltz
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:18 pm

Searching CJK font for character component

Post by akerbeltz »

I'm currently working with a Chinese font which has a lot of Private Use Area (PUA) characters. The first block seems to have been ordered neatly by radical plus additional strokes but once out of the first block, it's a bit of a mess (imagine someone wrote and English > German dictionary sorted alphabetically and then, after the main part, added a section on "Additional Words" but rather than sorting that alphabetically, they added them ad-hoc i.e. zygomorphic might be followed by nilotic and then arabesque because the dealt with zygomorphic first, then nilotic etc etc).

That makes searching for characters very hard work and I was wondering if there was a way to search for components? Let's say I'm searching for 睉 and cannot find it in the "ordered" block, is there a way of searching for a component (for example 坐)? A bit like in Word you can do a part of word search where "alg" will find both "alginate" and "algorithm"?
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Searching CJK font for character component

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Does Finding A Glyph work for CJK fonts?
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akerbeltz
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:18 pm

Re: Searching CJK font for character component

Post by akerbeltz »

Unfortunately not. Searching by mapping only works if you know the mapping but for a character with an unknown mapping, that clearly is not an option.

Glyph name also doesn't work because CJK characters rely on the code point for naming :oops: for example the name of 語 is U+8A9E CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-8A9E (where for A you'd find "Latin Capital Letter A"). There are "attributes" fields but even in canonical Unicode, these do not seem to include character constituents e.g. 語 you can in theory search for readings (=pronunciation) in the Unicode database(s) if they're included but not parts i.e. I cannot get to 語 by searching either for 訁or 吾 even with canonical Unicode, never mind PUA which seem to come with even less meta-data, certainly not readings as far as I've seen.
akerbeltz
Posts: 9
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:18 pm

Re: Searching CJK font for character component

Post by akerbeltz »

Some font makers (such as Babelstone) provide reference sheets for the composition of canonical CJK and their own PUA but obviously what a font does in the Private Use Area is different in each font that uses the PUA and I cannot (unfortunately) rely on the sheets provided by Babelstone to figure out what DFSongStd (the font I'm looking at) maps there.
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