An object-oriented architecture for Chinese character composition

Abstract

In the process of digitizing Chinese characters, approaches which are quite different from those used for European characters can reduce the storage required for the glyphs and, at the same time, improve the efficiency of digitization. However, these approaches often induce some other subprocesses and intermediate arguments which require a lot of human effort and knowledge. We illustrate an object-oriented approach to digitization of Chinese character glyphs (which we have implemented in Postscript), in which all intermediate subprocesses and arguments are hidden from the user, generating the characters in a black-box process.