Talk:Chinese character description languages

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Links for CDL[edit]

A Specification for CDL (IRGN985), by T.Bishop and R.Cook
IRGN986 = this link, by R.Cook
IRGN987, strokes issue, by T.Bishop and R.Cook
Chinese translation
Chinese Character Description Languages (CDL), by R.Cook

Stroke issue, by T.Bishop and R.Cook
Stroke issue2, by T.Bishop and R.Cook
[1], 2002/05/18, by R.Cook

KanjiVG[edit]

It'd be great for the section KanjiVG to be finally added. --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:11, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Plural ?[edit]

Should we rename the article Chinese_character_description_languages (plural) ? Or should we stick with singular, like cat ? Yug (talk) 17:50, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

To me the plural form makes more sense and I believe it is even required on en.WP, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals)#Exceptions ("Articles on groups or classes of specific things"; the character desciption languages presented here are highly specific and clearly distinct.). But if we decide to retain the singular we will need to rewrite the first sentence to something like "A Chinese character description language is one of several proposed languages ..." Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:39, 7 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Done, as there have been no objections in two years, and the first sentence still uses plural. ◅ Sebastian 08:06, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ideographic Description Sequences[edit]

Section Ideographic Description Sequences currently says: “These sequences [...] do not include detailed information about the locations and shapes of strokes. They do not, by themselves, provide enough information for an actual rendering of a character being described.” Although that text repeats itself, it does not provide enough information to the reader to be of any help. I'm not even sure if it's true. It certainly isn't for the given example, nor for any other example I can think of, including more complex ones such as “⿰扌⿱宀叉”. Can anyone provide an example of a character that can not be adequately rendered? ◄ Sebastian 11:05, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Let me first say that Unicode IDS's are not intended for rendering characters. The current standard says that "the reader can then create a mental picture of the ideographs from the description... In particular, support for the characters in the Ideographic Description block does not require the rendering engine to recreate the graphic appearance of the described character." — Also note the Equivalence section further down in the standard which says that "ideographs can be described in more than one way" using IDS's.

An example of identical IDS's for different characters is ⿱十一; this represents both 土 and 士. Another one is ⿴囗一 for 日 and 曰. That is to say, IDS's have no mechanism for dealing with relative size and, errr..., horizontal and vertical "distortion" of character components. Nor is it possible to express where exactly components intersect (⿻) or if the touch. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 23:06, 8 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks – excellent explanation and examples. I'll add at least one example to the article. ◄ Sebastian 00:53, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies if this is too self-promotion-y. I wrote a script to find ambiguous IDSs, and put my scripts and results https://github.com/awelotta/ambiguous-ideographic-description-sequences Awelotta (talk) 22:03, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Get rid of CDL?[edit]

I feel like this is some stealth marketing thing - there's no actual specification available when you go looking for it.... just software you can buy. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 14:31, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@TheSeer: The specification is hosted by the Ideographic Research Group which belongs to the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. Go to https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/n0901-1000.html and download the documents IRGN985_CDL_Specs, IRGN986_ChineseCDL, and IRGN987_CDL_Strokes. Like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), CDL is a special flavour of the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The Wenlin software is an implementation of CDL that uses extremely compressed files, it is not CDL itself. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:22, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wenlin Institute, Inc[edit]

In most parts of Asia, and therefore potentially 60% of the world in terms of population, "institute" is a legally reserved word meaning "educational institution" and so cannot be used to describe software companies which offer no educational courses. Therefore it is misleading to not to include the full name "Wenlin Institute, Inc" (which is used on wenlin.com).