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Japanese archaic font w obsolete kana?

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kaptengröt
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 Message 1 of 8
21 March 2014 at 9:54pm | IP Logged 
Hi, I was trying to write a lesson about something for Japanese... the problem is that I don't have a font that includes the obsolete kana. By that, I mean yi and wu and so on.

As you can see here, they did really exist with their own forms:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A4%E8%A1%8C%E3%82%A4

I'm trying to search, but all I'm finding is fonts that include ゐ and ゑ (which are already included in Unicode anyway). I don't specifically want a font that looks like brush strokes, in fact I'd rather have a clean, modern-looking font, but can anyone find one for me?
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Hampie
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 Message 2 of 8
22 March 2014 at 12:25am | IP Logged 
There are some hentaigana fonts out there, but, those were as far as I know never standardized and thus exist in a
variety of forms. My japanese is horrible, but the pictures on the page you're linking to looks like alternate forms for
i derived from 以. As far as yi concerns, I actually think there never was a kana for that, it fell out of use before the
begun writing in a sensible way and thus is so obsolete that you will not find it in anything but books about old
japanese.
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kaptengröt
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 Message 3 of 8
22 March 2014 at 1:41am | IP Logged 
I started making a compilation of scans/photos that show the obsolete ones here (although I'm resting for tonight and will finish it tomorrow):
http://hvitumavar.blog.se/japanese-original-50-kana-yi-ye-wu

The "yi" that I've seen a few times, you can see it a lot more clearly in this pic:


on this one it also seems to be an upside-down イ


Most font-like though, with all the missing ones, is probably going to be this one... but it doesn't match so much (this was from a book for modern Japanese, by the way, although by now it's 100 years old):
http://i1174.photobucket.com/albums/r612/hvitumavar/missingb ig.png

Then there's another handwriting one :
http://i1174.photobucket.com/albums/r612/hvitumavar/src_2135 4084.jpg

Edited by kaptengröt on 22 March 2014 at 2:02am

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kaptengröt
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 Message 4 of 8
22 March 2014 at 2:15am | IP Logged 
Update: Seems like there is one font made by some researcher guys here that should have it in there: http://www.mojikyo.org/PWU8N/index.php?TTF_download

Update x2: Seems like these are font-fonts, not stylized fonts, so that's great... now I have to sift through all the available characters and see if the ones I want are really in there though.

Edited by kaptengröt on 22 March 2014 at 2:39am

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Hampie
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 Message 5 of 8
22 March 2014 at 2:46pm | IP Logged 
Project Mojiko is huge and contains all CJK and CJK-like glyphs there were was. Have fun ;)
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kaptengröt
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 Message 6 of 8
22 March 2014 at 7:10pm | IP Logged 
Do you know which characters are in which fonts? Because there's like 50 .ttf files and I have no way of knowing beforehand simply which file has the ones I want...

Now I've installed all of them, but I can't see extra characters in the Mac character viewer apparently (I did do stuff like "click on い to see if a yi symbol was hidden there in some fonts" but it wasn't).

I tried installing Crossover and running the Mojikyo character viewer/map, but it didn't work...

Edited by kaptengröt on 22 March 2014 at 7:38pm

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LaughingChimp
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 Message 7 of 8
25 March 2014 at 3:20pm | IP Logged 
The problem is that Unicode doesn't support them, so there won't be a universal solution unless they're added. If the font has them, they will be in the private use area, not in the CJK set.
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kaptengröt
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 Message 8 of 8
25 March 2014 at 10:11pm | IP Logged 
That they're not in Unicode isn't a problem. The two easy solutions are to write using that font in a text file, then save that as a PDF or something else that preserves the font no matter who is reading it - or to embed the font onto the website itself so, similarly, no matter who is reading it can still view things correctly. I do the same when I write in ᚱᚢᚾᚮᚱᚾᛆ since even though those are in Unicode most people don't have a font that has them installed.

Even if it became a question of "I can only have one font in one place", it's really easy to just substitute some unused characters into the necessary few ones in the normal font (ex. edit the font and turn the letter å into a kana, save the font and then use that). That's what I'm doing write now when making this font, I am just putting the hiragana ye where é is and the katakana ye where É is for easy access.

(In my case it doesn't really matter as it's either going onto printed paper or a PDF.)

I was linked to http://www10.plala.or.jp/koin/koinhentaigana.html
And told to search for more 変体仮名 fonts too, although I can easily guess that most of them will be brush stroke fonts so that's why I just gave up and started making my own based on the example images I had found...

Edited by kaptengröt on 25 March 2014 at 10:16pm



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