Introduction

This list tries to give an overview of features supported by cjklib. If you would like to see some examples try Screenshots. See abstract Goals; a different view on features is given by WhyUseCjklib.

Details

Romanisations/readings

• Break down (decompose) strings into single reading entities
• Join (compose) single entities together, apply formatting where needed
• Handle various decompositions for ambiguous input
• List of supported reading entities
• Tonal languages:
• Combine base syllable with tone and get tone from syllable for tonal languages
• Choice of diacritics and tone marks, set according to placement rules
• Reading dialects:
• Support of various (e.g. non-standard) realisations of a reading (reading dialect), e.g. type face variations
• Guessing of given reading realisation to pinpoint reading dialect
• Conversion of variation to standard form
• Analysis of syllable forms, e.g breaking into onset and rhyme

• Conversion between readings:
• Conversion of strings including non-reading entities
• Preservation of upper and lower case
• Support of user-adapted conversion for ambiguous cases
• Error handling for ambiguous cases/conversion errors
• Support of non-standard realisations of input reading (reading dialect)

Currently supported readings

• Mandarin Chinese:
• Pinyin
• Gwoyeu Romatzyh
• Wade-Giles
• IPA
• Braille
• Yue (Cantonese):
• Cantonese Yale
• Jyutping
• IPA (work in progress)
• Wu (Shanghainese):
• IPA
• Korean
• Hangul
• Japanese
• Kana (Hiragana & Katakana)

Character to reading mapping

• Character to reading and reading to character mappings as supported by the Unihan database for Mandarin Chinese, Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghainese) and Korean
• Support of non-standard realisations of input reading (reading dialect)

Radicals

• Mapping of characters to their Kangxi radical
• Lookup of radical forms and radical variants
• Mapping between Unicode radical forms and equivalent characters
• Multi-radical search (see character components)

Variants

• Variant information as given by the Unihan database:
• Compatible character forms
• Semantic variant forms, often used interchangeably
• Specialised semantic variant forms, often used interchangeably but limited to certain contexts
• Z-variant forms, which only differ in typeface
• Simplified Chinese character forms, originating from the character simplification process of the PR China
• Traditional character forms for a simplified Chinese character
• Database of character variants for components and stroke decomposition on a glyph basis (see below)
• Default mapping of glyph form for locale

Character components

• Decomposition of characters into components
• Component tree with structural information
• Component search with equivalent forms

Strokes

• Glyph dependant stroke count
• Unicode stroke forms
• Stroke order of characters
• Abbreviated ASCII names for strokes

Data

The library comes with its own set of sources on:

• Pinyin syllables
• Gwoyeu Romatzyh syllables including rhotacised forms and abbreviations
• Wade-Giles syllables
• Jyutping syllables
• Cantonese Yale syllables
• Pinyin to Gwoyeu Romatzyh mapping
• Wade-Giles to Pinyin mapping
• Pinyin to IPA mapping
• Pinyin to Braille mapping
• Jyutping to Cantonese Yale mapping
• Jyutping to IPA mapping
• Shanghainese (IPA) syllables
• mapping of characters to Shanghainese pronunciation
• mapping of Mandarin syllables to onset and rhyme
• mapping of Cantonese syllables to onset and rhyme
• Kangxi radical forms
• stroke count and stroke order
• stroke names
• character decomposition

See the data files for comparison with other sources.

This project makes use of the Unicode Han database provided by the Unicode Consortium: Unicode Standard Annex #38 - Unicode Han database (Unihan): http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/, 28.03.2008.

The following data is used:

• Character Kangxi radical information (from kRSKangxi)
• Radical residual stroke count (from kRSKangxi) and total stroke count (from KTotalStrokes)
• Mandarin character readings in Pinyin (from kHanyuPinlu, kXHC1983, kHanyuPinyin)
• Cantonese character readings in Jyutping (from kCantonese)
• Korean character readings in Hangul (from kHangul)
• Character variant forms (from kCompatibilityVariant, kSemanticVariant, kSimplifiedVariant, kSpecializedSemanticVariant, kTraditionalVariant, kZVariant)

This includes dictionary data from:

• kXHC1983: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Cídiǎn (现代汉语词典). Shāngwù Yìnshūguǎn, Beijing,
• kHanyuPinlu: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Pínlǜ Cídiǎn (現代漢語頻率詞典). 北京語言學院語言教學研究所編著, First edition 1986/6, 2nd printing 1990/4, ISBN 7-5619-0094-5.
• kHanyuPinyin: Hànyǔ Dà Zìdiǎn (漢語大字典). 許力以主任，徐中舒主編，（漢語大字典工作委員會）。 武漢：四川辭書出版社，湖北辭書出版社, 1986-1990. ISBN: 7-5403-0030-2/H.16.

Build system

A dependancy based, modular build system is supplied for creating the library's database from packaged data files and from Unicode's Unihan database or Kanjidic2. Additionally Unihan's data can be overloaded by more precise data if available.

Dictionaries

Support for EDICT, CEDICT, the Gwoyeu Romatzyh Version of CEDICT (called CEDICTGR here), HanDeDict and CFDICT with full-text search included for command-line tool cjknife.