Project Title: Chinese music instrument: 'Qin' notation web generator

Background:

A Chinese character is a two dimensional typological representation of strokes and radicals. This is unlike English letters, where there are only 26 letters which combine in one dimension. As there are thousands of Chinese characters, any Chinese character font require more space (2 bytes) for its computer encoding. Additionally, it takes more time for the creation of a complete font set.

Another big problem is web communication. If a character is not available from the client's font set, there is no clean way to put the information in the web document. This is what originally drove me to work on dynamic character generation.

In the year 2000-2003, my supervisor, Dr. Wai Wong (Hong Kong Baptist University), and I worked on Chinese character rendering using Metapost. Metapost (a tool by Donald Knuth) is a mathematical representation giving quality font output. We successfully developed a Chinese description language called Hanglyph, and a character rendering system. For more information, please refer to papers published in TUG and ACM as below:

• Candy YIU L.K. and Wai WONG, Chinese Character Synthesis System, Proceedings of ACM PG Conference, Hong Kong, China. January 25, 2003
• Candy YIU L.K. and Wai WONG, Chinese Character Synthesis Using Metapost, Proceedings of 24th Annual Meeting and Conference of TeX Users Group, Hawaii, USA. July 22-25, 2003
• Wai WONG, Candy YIU L.K. and Kelvin NG C.F., Typesetting Rare Chinese Characters in LaTeX, Proceedings of the 14th European TeX Conference, France. June 24-27, 2003

The Qin is a Chinese musical instrument with a music specificaton language that serves as a good example of Chinese character stroke and radical combinations. The notation which represents the music is made with a set of characters and radicals. People who show Qin notation on the web have to scan an image and put it on the web. This project attempts to use Qin notation generation to demonstrate the possibility of Chinese character rendering.

Project Description:

This project is mainly divided into two parts. One is the Qin notation description language, another is the web notation generator. The descripton language will be done with part of Hanglyph. It is a syntax which can describe hierarchical structure. The Qin description language will be based on the basic characters and components. The rendering will re-construct the notation using Metapost based on Hanglyph. A web generator will output the pages with the Qin notation to allow communication over the internet.

Project Developer: Candy Yiu. L.K
Project Supervisor: Jim Binkley, Bart Massey (Portland State University)