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In article <1jpj9sINNlie@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU> crowl@jade.CS.ORST.EDU (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
>An encoding every variant of every character ever written is not?  At
>214 radicals, we can represent a radical in eight bits, and a character
>in 8*(average number of radicals per character).  Your non-unified
>approach would require roughly eighteen bits per character.

Forget about encoding Han characters as a string of radicals (at least
the Kangxi radicals).  It won't work.  Take the first 10 Unihan characters
as a test.  Each of these are composed of radical 1 (meaning 'one') plus
additional strokes as follows, with the additional strokes further
decomposable as follows:

4E00	rad 1 + 0 strokes = rad 1
4E01	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + rad 6
4E02	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + ?
4E03	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + rad 5
4E04	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + rad 2
4E05	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + rad 2
4E06	rad 1 + 1 strokes = rad 1 + rad 4
4E07	rad 1 + 2 strokes = rad 1 + ?
4E08	rad 1 + 2 strokes = rad 1 + ?
4E09	rad 1 + 2 strokes = rad 1 + rad 7

4E02, 4E07, and 4E08 do not have a complete decomposition by these radicals;
on the other hand, 4E04 and 4E05 have the same decomposition.  The main
problems with your proposal (which frequently appears and soon disappears)
are (1) more component radicals are needed than in the Kanxi radical set,
and (2) a mechanism is needed to disambiguate identical decompositions.

Another component set, called the Chiao-tung set, contains 446 components
and has been shown to generate more than 48,700 characters; however, even
it fails to describe certain characters.  Perhaps as many as 1,200 components
are needed to fully describe all known characters.

To disambiguate identical decompositions, it is necessary to tag each
decomposed component with a position and size metric.  The fully decomposed
character can then be unambiguously described as the sum of N components,
each having a specified position and size.

This more thorough method would only suffice to describe characters as
abstract shapes.  It would not be sufficient to describe the glyphs which
correspond to these characters.  A glyph decomposition would have to
use a collection of strokes, perhaps as few as 40, along with the position
and size of each stroke, to describe each glyph a Han character might
take.  Furthermore, since more than one glyph can represent the same
character, some mechanism by which such a family of glyphs could be
interrelated would probably be needed.

There are a number of text processing domains where character decomposition
might be useful:

1. character encoding
2. character input
3. text compression

Similarly, glyph decomposition might be useful in the following domains:

1. font encoding
2. glyph representation
3. glyph recognition (OCR)

Since the present discussion revolves around character encoding issues,
it is useful to say how decomposition may affect character representation
and processing:

1. Reduces character code element requirements:  the number of code elements
   required could be as few as N components + P relative positions +
   S relative sizes.  Assuming that 1200 components could fully generate all
   characters; and assuming that P and S could be digitized to a small
   set of discrete values (say 10 or fewer each), then perhaps as few as
   1220 character code positions would be required.

2. Increases string lengths:  my guess is that, on the average, approximately
   4-5 components would be necessary, and, since each would require a position
   and size attribute, total string length would be increased by 9-12 times
   over a fully precomposed character encoding.  This could be reduced by
   multiply encoding each component, with one encoding for each position and
   size which that component could take.  In this case, if we assume that
   a fourth of the possible 10*10 position/size feature space was actually
   used by each component (on average), then 25*1200 code points would be
   needed, bringing us up to 25,000 code points.  A string would now increase
   only 3-4 times in size (in the average case), since position and size would
   be implicit.  However, the attraction of a small number of code points would
   be lost.

3. Increase compression efficiency in the case of only using 1220 code
   positions; most compression schemes compress at a ratio which is
   directly proportional to the symbol count:  fewer symbols mean better
   compression.

4. Allows for simple creation of new Han character symbols using combinatorial
   methods.

5. Text operations which must operate on each such decomposed Han character
   must now parse the string to find the boundaries of each decomposed Han
   character.  Indexing now becomes a O(n) problem, rather than a O(1)
   problem.


To summarize, a decomposed Han character approach may reduce the number of
code points needed from approximately 2^16 to approximately 2^11; however
text storage sizes will have a commensurate increase.  So, to roughly gauge
this, we might have:

  precomposed encoding

  2^20 precomposed characters *
  2^16 bits/precomposed character =
  2^36 bits

  decomposed encoding

  2^20 precomposed characters *
  2^4  decomposed characters/precomposed character *
  2^11 bits/decomposed character =
  2^35 bits

Thus a decomposed encoding may produce a 2 times space savings overall;
perhaps more still if the average decomposition is much smaller than 16
elements.  However, the cost of processing now increases dramatically
since indexing is no longer possible without parsing a string.  Furthermore,
nobody is going to use 11 bit character codes.  Once you go over 8 bits,
the only logical choice is 16 bits, or perhaps 32 bits.  Since 32 bits is
clearly overkill, there remains a 16-bit encoding model:  Unicode.

Perhaps further investigation of decomposition is justified in the context
of finding good compression algorithms; however, it is not justified in
the context of finding a reasonably simple yet adequate character encoding.

Some information regarding Han character and glyph decomposition which was
used above was taken from "On the Formalization of Glyph in Chinese
Language," by C. C. Hsieh, C. T. Chang, and Jack K. T. Huang, Feb 6, 1990,
a contribution to the Kyoto meeting of AFII (Association for Font Information
and Interchange).

Glenn Adams