+DATE: [2010-10-28T11:44:06+0900]

+TITLE: README for cjkinfo

• Intro

Over many years I have collected various bits and pieces of information about East-Asian, especially Chinese characters. There is really no reason to keep this secret, except for the fact that:

• The stuff appearing here is my own personal copy, not revised or polished for publication
• So far I have been too lazy to clean things up and make them available, but since people continue to ask about it, I will start to dig stuff out and put them here
• Use at your own risk, but with attribution please.

• License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

• Contents

Here is what there is so far:

** Pinyin stuff Sometime in August 2006, I tried to improve my pinyin tables by introducing frequency information, that would allow a program to choose the most frequent one if an automatic decision has to be made. The resulting file is pinyinstat.tab, while most of the other files are intermediate files that I used to produce this. All this is in the pinyin directory.

• pinyinstat.tab

  the file currently has 81986 lines, including characters from CJK-Extension B, so be careful when handling it.

• charratio.tab

• pyflat.tab

• pybigram.tab

• pyprob.txt

• pinyin-merge.tab

• pinyintable.tab

** Variant stuff

• univardb.xml

  This file basically encodes the information from the Unihan database as of ca. 2006 into XML.

• twjp-vardb.xml

  This file groups characters together that can appear exchangeable in certain context. Characters within each group are flagged either with @type='reg' as regular characters (whatever that means) or as 'shinji', which means these are the simplified characters in modern use in Japan (which could be considered regular by some). There is also a @type='tw', which signals a character that would be seen by users in Taiwan or using Traditional Chinese characters. In this group, there is typically another character flagged as @subtype='jp', which means, that this is the form used in Japan.

** More to come

Whenever I have time to dig it out and describe it here.

• Questions?

  Please ask me at cwittern (at) gmail (dot) com

  Christian Wittern