Just recently this blog has seen a post about Tegaki. It's a handwriting recognition system for Chinese Characters/Kanji, and I tried a bootstrapping process for a missing model of Traditional Chinese. Yesterday I started to think about other possibilities of Tegaki and wanted to try recognizing single strokes.

First stable version of cjklib released.

October 19th, 2009
We would like to announce the first stable release of cjklib, a new Python-based programming library providing higher-level support of Chinese characters, also called Han characters.

Just yesterday, I committed a new list of character decompositions to cjklib, that was gratefully released under LGPL by Gavin Grover. While until now the about 500 entries served more as a proof of concept, we now have more than 20.000 decompositions spanning the most important characters as encoded by Unicode.

So I wanted to do something nice with this new set of data. I picked the Tegaki project which offers handwriting recognition for Kanji and Hanzi, the latter for Simplified Chinese. I remember showing off the Qt widget I developed to a friend, who then promptly drew a Traditional Chinese character that couldn't be recognized. That was of course because Tegaki (and back then Tomoe) doesn't support Traditional Chinese. Until now.