Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> I'm wondering what happens when someone fluent in, say,
> Chinese, starts to hand-letter a neat body of text,
> forming the characters (in a small size!)
> with some care, and then needs to use one of those rare 36-(or
> more)-stroke wonders. All "bounding boxes" must be the same
> size, so what does the writer do?

There are no "bounding boxes" in handwritten Chinese. The width and height
of characters vary widely depending on their complexity.

E.g., see this example of a quite ordinary andwriting:

http://posh-dude.org/image/chinese.JPG

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Cingar