[OS X TeX] Re: Looking for CJK font character ?

[John B. Thoo]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 12:00 PM, <macosx-tex-request at email.esm.psu.edu> <macosx-tex-request at email.esm.psu.edu> wrote:

> Message: 9
> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 21:18:50 +0800
> From: Danyll Wills <dwills at netvigator.com>
> 
> John,
> 
> It is always possible that the character å∏" exists on some ancient stone or document but for the most part  å∏" is used in modern Chinese written by those in China and Singapore using Simplified characters. For Hong Kong and Taiwan, the older character ç.¶ is used. If you study calligraphy as I do, you will see the connection and I have looked up ç.¶ in one of my calligraphy dictionaries and in some forms by some of the old masters, it is very close to  å∏". The text you mention from Wikipedia was printed in 1973 but there is no reference. I imagine it was simply that the authors at the time used Simplified characters despite the fact that they were referring to something very ancient. Today, many scholars even on the mainland will use Traditional characters for something like that.

In that case, I will use the Traditional character that you pointed out to me.


> None of this helps you, I fear. The real problem as I see it is what you are trying to do. If you simply need the character, it may not matter where you get it from. The character å∏" is in the Hiragino font on the Mac because the Japanese 'new' version of the ancient ç.¶ is also å∏" but that is a Japanese font and on my machine you will only find it if you know the Japanese name ãf'ãf©ã,®ãfZæ~Zæoˇ Pro (Hiragino Minchou Pro). If you use a Japanese font you may not have enough characters for what you want to do and also, you have the problem of finding the right character if you do not know how to pronounce it in Japanese.
> 
> That brings me to the real problem. Are you able to use any Chinese input system? I am assuming from your text that you may not be able to. That is a bit of a problem. I am not certain how to advise you on that. I use pinyin and it works extremely well for both Traditional and SImplified. I would suggest Unicode for the same reason: it covers nearly everything you would need (unless you need a really obscure character but in that case Big 5 is not likely to help much either.)

At this point I need only a handful of characters to fulfill some examples, so I think I'll just make do with my Big5 kludge.  Should I need to typeset CJK characters more extensively in the future, then I'll certainly return to consider all of your suggestions.


> With a little bit of study, you could learn how to look up characters using the old radical system and then find them in the Character Viewer but that would require rather a lot of effort.
> 
> Good luck with your work.

Thank you.  And happy New Year to you and everyone on this list!  I've learnt a lot from y'all, both directly and indirectly.

Cheerio.

---John.

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