哎哟！The fleeting characters...

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

[First, sorry Mike for being the most annoying person on this board....]

咋的了

Uh...
'
basically i'm looking for "扌蚩" this character -- and when i look up 蚩 in pleco then do the character information chars / containing - the character actually shows up (it even has stroke order!) but when i go to Words and search through all the dictionaries ... it's not there ... not even uni has it - as if it doesnt exist!

晕倒了

Just in case i wasnt clear
[in p2 you can see "扌蚩" or if this shows even...and then it's unfindable after i click it...]

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, that's what we get for having a ridiculously large character database but no dictionary to go with it. Basically, the stroke order data set we licensed included full support for Unicode Extension B - a giant new block of Chinese characters they added to the Unicode standard - but hardly any dictionaries include more than a handful of characters from it. So our software can render those characters correctly, and even give you stroke order diagrams for them, but it doesn't actually have any information about what they mean.

However, it appears that newer versions of Unihan actually do support this particular character - do a Google search for 22C5F and you'll see a few places with info on it. So once we update our Unihan database we'll be able to support it as well.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Yeah, that's what we get for having a ridiculously large character database but no dictionary to go with it. Basically, the stroke order data set we licensed included full support for Unicode Extension B - a giant new block of Chinese characters they added to the Unicode standard - but hardly any dictionaries include more than a handful of characters from it. So our software can render those characters correctly, and even give you stroke order diagrams for them, but it doesn't actually have any information about what they mean.

Is there anyway to "grab" the character?
copy it -> send it some where -> use it...?
or is it just like in character purgatory, so to speak...?

I've since found it else where put it in a txt and imported it to my own dictionary, but originally I couldn't even find it and was trying to get it to use it.

However, it appears that newer versions of Unihan actually do support this particular character - do a Google search for 22C5F and you'll see a few places with info on it. So once we update our Unihan database we'll be able to support it as well.

How, exactly, do you find the unicode for the character?
Do you just go through the unicode database pdf?
Are there simpler ways?

Obviously, ya'lls are quite busy, but will there be an update for Unihan in the near future?

 

[mikelove]

Is there anyway to "grab" the character?
copy it -> send it some where -> use it...?
or is it just like in character purgatory, so to speak...?

Add "Code Point" to the list of items displayed and that will show you the Unicode character code, which you can then do a search for.

Obviously, ya'lls are quite busy, but will there be an update for Unihan in the near future?

It'll be a while, unfortunately - it's not just updating the database, we also have to change the database format to accommodate larger characters (32-bit instead of 16-bit) since Extension B characters like this are outside of the basic 16-bit Chinese character range. We've been slowly supporting that in a few places - text display has been the biggest priority - but given how infrequently-used these characters are, it's tough to really make it a priority relative to the other things people are clamoring for.

 

[insighter]

Sorry to be annoying, but would this upgrade include rendering for non-radical strokes(笔画),for example㇀(提)?

 

[mikelove]

Sorry to be annoying, but would this upgrade include rendering for non-radical strokes(笔画),for example㇀(提)?

Not sure what you mean by "rendering for" them - you want them to display in the character components screen?

 

[insighter]

I thught render meant display more or less, but I really could be wrong. Basically when I try to have that stroke (or many others) as a flashcard headword then it displays either nothing or a box with an X through it. There aren't an enormous amount so I could learn it the old fashioned way with pen and paper, but most of my Chinese learning involves Pleco in some way so I figured I'd try to involve it in this as well.

 

[mikelove]

I thught render meant display more or less, but I really could be wrong. Basically when I try to have that stroke (or many others) as a flashcard headword then it displays either nothing or a box with an X through it. There aren't an enormous amount so I could learn it the old fashioned way with pen and paper, but most of my Chinese learning involves Pleco in some way so I figured I'd try to involve it in this as well.

How did you enter the stroke on the card? Where did you copy it from? Sounds like this may simply be a case of the font file we're using not supporting it, but that should be easy to work around.

 

[insighter]

They could be copied from a number of sources, a prominent one would be the Unicode excerpt on the CJK strokes page which is part of the Wikipedia entry on Chinese character here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_(CJK_character).
Here's a direct link to the Unicode chart as well. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U31C0.pdf

 

[mikelove]

They could be copied from a number of sources, a prominent one would be the Unicode excerpt on the CJK strokes page which is part of the Wikipedia entry on Chinese character here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_(CJK_character).
Here's a direct link to the Unicode chart as well. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U31C0.pdf

Hmm... it actually doesn't look like those are even supported by the iPhone's built-in Chinese fonts; do they appear correctly anywhere else on your iPhone?

 

[insighter]

I had only visited those pages before on my computer, but yes it seems like most of them aren't supported on my iPod. Only one showed up when I visited the Wikipedia article. Is that a major limitation then?

 

[mikelove]

I had only visited those pages before on my computer, but yes it seems like most of them aren't supported on my iPod. Only one showed up when I visited the Wikipedia article. Is that a major limitation then?

Well they're a relatively new addition to the Unicode standard - 5.1, released in April of 2008 - and they're not especially widely used at the moment, so it's not unreasonable that Apple might have excluded them from their built-in device fonts. But now that they've shifted to delta updates (meaning that they don't have to push 600 MB of unchanged data files to every person with an iDevice every time they release a minor bug fix) hopefully they'll get a little more generous with included data files in iOS 6. (personally I'd love to see them license a dozen or so new English fonts - it'd really spice up iOS app design to have some more options on that)