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, 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?

> 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".

>
> > To my untrained in Chinese eyes, I
> > don't see any spacing issues that are outside the error inherent in
> > handwriting habits.
>
> There are no spacing issues or errors, in fact, as I said, that's quite an
> ordinary and legible handwriting.

I agree it is quite ordinary.

>
> > It all looks "box bound" to me...
>
> It depends what you mean by "box bound". As you certainly know, in printed
> Chinese all characters occupy an ideal square which is exactly the
> same size
> for all characters. In handwriting, this is simply not the case.

That handwriting is not perfect does not mean there are no boxes
considered when the writing is done. As another correspondent mentioned,
the height of these chars varies, but yet each one stays within the box
(blue lines).

Examples:

- 1st and 5th chars, 1st line, are the same char but differ in width.
This is just sloppiness probably.
- all punctuation is horizontally spaced well within the range of all
the other chars.
- height is not strictly related to complexity: see 1st and 7th char,
2nd line, and 9th and 10th char, 2nd line for example

If anything, my hypothesis at this point is "Simpler chars can be
written *smaller* within the box, but don't have to be. Some horizontal
variation in spacing is OK, but not too much. No vertical expansion
outside the box allowed. "


Best,

Barry