漢字字碼與資料庫國際研討會，京都•東京 1996年10月4日
從缺字問題，談漢字交換碼的重新設計──第二部分

A Descriptive Method for Re-engineering Hanzi
Information Interchange Codes

2. The Representation of Hanzi Knowledge

(2) Definitions

In this section, some definitions of basic terms will be given as a basis for further development. These definitions follows the discussions in Part 1.

Character is an abstract concept. They are differentiated only by the meanings they carried. For example, a normal form and its corresponding simplified form are considered to be the same character. Characters are identified only by the code assigned to each of them.

A character may have many glyphs. Glyph is also an abstract concept. They are differentiated by their own structures or skeletons. As in the previous example, the normal form and the simplified form of a character are two glyphs of that character.

It is possible that some characters share one glyph. Since we do not dealing the semantic meaning of characters at this moment, we postpone this problem as a future research topic.

Glyph does not care how nice a typeface may shown, but font cares. A font is a collection of general design rules for a certain style of typefaces. So, font is also abstract in sense. They are differentiated by their design rules. Although font specifies design rules, it has some degree of freedom that allow designers to express their own

posture. A font designed may have some parameters to specify the size, the broadness of strokes, the ratio of broadness of vertical and horizontal strokes, etc.. After these parameters have been chosen, then one can see a physical typeface on media.

The described relationship among character, glyph, font, and typeface are shown in 〔Figure 3〕. Please notice that existing Interchange Codes and software systems do not and can not differentiate character and glyph. This phenomena is the source of all troubles of Hanzi processing that we have today.