i18n@... wrote:

> Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > i18n@... wrote:
> > > Marco,
> > > Could you explain which characters in that sample are the
> > > ones that expand outside the bounding box?
> >
> > I din't say that characters go out of boxes but that there
> > are no boxes at all.
>
> Uh, in learning to write Japanese, I , and hundreds of millions of
> others, are taught to write within the square.
>
> Now, Variations exist in a range for normal writers, just as with
> other languages, because we are not machines. also, there are.
> to my understanding, sets of styles analogous to cursive and
> block writing to help manage the complexity
> issue in practice. But I never heard "there are no boxes" before, in
> fact quite the opposite. Any visit to Chinese, Japanese, and probably
> Korean stationery stores, where they have notebooks for school kids,
> will demonstrate this..

Of course, I too learned to write Chinese characters in big squares divided
internally into four quadrants, and later on I passed to 1-centimeter
squared paper. But AFAIK that's only for beginners: alphabetized Chinese
write on ordinary ruled on blank paper.

Even in the West, children begin (or used to, when I was a kid) to write on
specially ruled notebooks having multiple lines, in order to help them
sizing their ascenders and descenders properly, e.g.:
http://www.gtcocalcomp.com/erc/interwritebackgrounds_writing.htmdescenders

> > Of course, any shape scratched on a piece of paper can be
> inscribed into a
> > rectangle as bound as possible to the shape.
>
>
> OK, I will bite - so is it logical to infer that printed fonts and
> handwriting teachings for children very in construction
> pprinciple then for adults?

Probably yes. Also consider that there are very different styles of
calligraphy, in some of which it is important to keep all characters occupy
the same amount of space (so, these do in fact have "bounding boxes") and
others which don't.

Especially, the very cursive style known as "caishu" or "grass script"
typically avoids any kind of geometric bounds. E.g.:

http://home.flash.net/~cameron/calligraphy/scripts/image008.jpg
http://www.uh.edu/~dli3/dacun0901024beta.GIF
http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Culture/language-Grass-script.jpg
http://lambcutlet.org/albums/Day_12/Four_scrolls_in_Grass_Script.sized.jpg

> > However, doing this on our
> > sample results in completely irregular "boxes", ranging
> > from the huge one enclosng "漢" (1st character of 2nd row)
> > to the tiny one for "二" (5th
> > character of secondo row):
> >
> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qalam/files/bbox.gif
> > (I also attached the picture to this mail, but am not sure
> > whether it will pass through.)
>
> That is not quite right. The upper and lower boundaries are
> clearly the ruled lines on the page. The left and right ones
> are more or less 1/2
> way between the chars.The bounding boxes we speak of are not "minimum
> boxes".
> [...]

OK, I won't go into arguing your fine details here.

Of course, one can interpret a certain reality as the result of lack of
rules, while another one interprets it as the result of a very complex set
of rules... That's probably why religious freedom was invented, after all.
:-)

--
Marco