Unihan variants information

via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Mon Jan 28 06:57:29 CST 2019


I've developped an open-source, multi-platform desktop application called Unicode Plus <https://github.com/tonton-pixel/unicode-plus>, which is a set of utilities related to Unicode, Unihan and emoji.

The basic Unihan-related utilities are almost completed, and now I would like to add more useful information about the Unihan variants:

1. First option: "Linear Information"

- A linear list of all the variants *related* to one given Unihan character would be displayed, similar to what can be found in Apple's Character Viewer (or Palette), or in the "Unihan Variant Dictionary" application.

- Two sources of data could be merged:

	1. The information provided by the "Variants table for Unicode" data file UniVariants.txt <http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/ftp/CJKtable/UniVariants.Z> by Prof. Kōichi Yasuoka.
	
	2. The information extracted from the relevant Unihan DB tag properties: kSemanticVariant, kSimplifiedVariant, kSpecializedSemanticVariant, kTraditionalVariant, kZVariant.

- Discarding self-variants, assuming that Z-variants are somehow symmetrical, and possibly merge the different types of variants tags would result into independant sets of *related* Unihan characters. Acessing the info would then simply imply testing which set a given character belongs to, and omit the character itself for display.

- This kind of information is most certainly user-friendly, however it lacks structural information about the relationships between the different variants.

2. Second option: "Structured Information"

- This is probably more ambitious and challenging: ideally, the information could be displayed graphically as a diagram of characters joined by arrowed links, indicating the type of variant. It would support one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one relationships...


Any ideas, comments, suggestions are most welcome...

-- Michel MARIANI
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