Kanji vector art ?

[Hannu Rinne]

Does anyone know some reliable source for Kanji hieroglyphs ( vector art ) ? I just want to be sure to purchase the right hieroglyphs for the needed words ( I don't like to insult my customer with a wrong figure ).

Regards, Hannu

[Dee Gallo]

Hannu,

Look here: http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html

But they will only give you the characters, you will have to trace your own vector lines.

cheers, dee

[Hannu Rinne]

Dee,

Thank you x 1000 :) ! It took me a while to think over how to copy the character into Corel, but eventually it was easy to do.

Thanks again,
Hannu

[Roy Nicholson]

A few I have but the file is too large to post.

if you send me an email through pm I'll get what I have to you

Regards

Roy N.

[Robert Walters]

If you're running Windows, you could just install the foreign language pack
which will install the TTF Font face which can be vector outlined.

If you don't already have it installed, just visit a .cn website in IE.
It'll usually ask you if you want to install it.

http://yahoo.cn/ as example.

[Hannu Rinne]

Robert,

Thanks for the tip ! It was also easy to open by double clicking the needed character, then copy and paste in Corel, convert to curves and stretch to the needed size.

Regards
Hannu

[Pete Bejmuk]

A foreign language pack is the way to go, once installed you can then download a ton of free fonts to find the best looking one. Just remember that Japanese/Kanji fonts are different from Chinese fonts.

Even with a language pack and font , finding the actual character you need is often tough. If you know what the pronunciation of the characters are, you'll probably can just use the language bar in windows and a word processor to automatically look up the character(s).

So say your client wants the characters for "Japan", which is pronounced "Nihon" in phoentic japanese. So you set your language (in the language bar) to japanese/Hiragana, start typing NIHON (followed by space) and a little drop-down list will appear all the characters/words that correspond to that phoentic spelling. You can then copy & paste that into Corel or whatever program you use. If you want to double check the meaning of a Japanese/Chinese/Korean character, paste it into http://www.popjisyo.com and you can look up the words that way.

Otherwise, you're stuck with using the windows character map to browse a ton of characters that will all start to look the same after a half hour of browsing. If you're doing it this way, definitely have someone proof the foreign characters though - a single little dot or hash mark in some languages can mean a totally different word. Often (especially in Hangul/Korean), you'll think you've found the character you need but it's a mirror image of what you want. You can't just mirror it in Corel - it may look good to your untrained eye, but it will look weird to a professional (because of the direction of the strokes).