Stroke Order and Character Standards

Carp

Member
Hello,

I have a few questions:

  1. When one selects traditional characters in the stroke order functionality, what is one exactly studying in terms of standards? It is not the Taiwan or the HK standard (卝 and 艹 are always written with three strokes), but is also does not seem to fit the current official standard for traditional characters in the Mainland, the 古籍印刷通用字规范字形表. So, what is it?
  2. When It comes to fonts, which ones follow which standards (I'm talking iOS here, not sure about Android). Apart from the PingFang ones which are quite specific for Mainland or Taiwan use, I'm not fully clear which fonts one needs to choose to follow each standard.
Thanks!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
When one selects traditional characters in the stroke order functionality, what is one exactly studying in terms of standards? It is not the Taiwan or the HK standard (卝 and 艹 are always written with three strokes), but is also does not seem to fit the current official standard for traditional characters in the Mainland, the 古籍印刷通用字规范字形表. So, what is it?

Are you looking at the Kai or the Song style diagrams? The Song ones should be following the Mainland standard for stroke order - the Kai ones are kind of all over the place (hence the "experimental").

When It comes to fonts, which ones follow which standards (I'm talking iOS here, not sure about Android). Apart from the PingFang ones which are quite specific for Mainland or Taiwan use, I'm not fully clear which fonts one needs to choose to follow each standard.

PingFang and Source Han Sans are the only ones we include that are specifically tied to one standard or the other - the others are pretty much all Mainland oriented.
 

Carp

Member
@mikelove

Thanks! My idea was more about the traditional diagrams (both Kai and Song). I know that the simplified characters follow the 通用規範漢字表 and its 筆順 (formalized in a standard last year). The question is, what about the traditional diagrams?

The mainland now has formalized the traditional characters for use there in the document I mentioned, which is fairly recent, and is (logically, since it's very new) different from the Song stroke order diagrams for traditional. As I mentioned, the Song stroke order diagrams for traditional are different from the Taiwan and HK standards, and also different from the new Mainland standard for printed traditional characters. My question is, what were they based on? What is used to decide what 觀 or 警 looks like?

Thanks!!!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We sourced the Song diagrams from Wenlin, I think they just used their best judgement for how to draw them as this was in the era before that new Mainland standard existed.

We're working on a new set of stroke order diagrams which will likewise follow the Mainland standard for stroke order and be based on our current Kai font (on iOS), both for simplified and traditional. Depending on how much that ends up costing, we may consider doing a separate set of stroke order diagrams with a Taiwan-optimized font based on Taiwan standards, but we'd probably make that a separate add-on if we did.
 
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