Dragon Character Training :: Developers
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Developers
If you would like to create your own datasets, or would like to contribute to the dataset distributed with the application, you will need the character editor. It is a simple AWT java application I've knocked together for editing characters using line segments and bezier curves, which draws the character in the background with a common font.
Before you are going to digitize new characters we would like to ask you to take a look at the very few simple rules for digitizing Chinese characters. These rules help us to maintain consistent stroke ordering for the database data and also give some background information. Also, we have a first (albeit very rough) overview about basic and derived strokes.
The character editor, data files and associated tools are available in the project CVS as dragon-data, and are gradually evolving as people fix/improve parts of it. The first thing to do to get involved is to check out the code, and get on the project mailing list (very low volume).
Character editor
Developer resources
- Project CVS Modules: dragon-data (the datasets + java tools for editing and packaging them), dragon-palmos (the PalmOS software), dragon-directory (the PHP scripts for the character database)
- Dragon Directory The online database of characters which people are working on adding, here you can see what has been done, and hopefully we can avoid overlapping work - if you want to get involved, send a message to the mailing list and I'll send you a login for this database
- The dragon-char-datasets mailing list where we discuss the progress of the dataset and the associated software tools
To do list
- Improve artwork - can you help? The current artwork is black and white and 160x160 - we need someone with some talent to do some colour hires stuff :)
- Keep extending datasets
- Make a java-applet version of the character editor so that anyone can work on the characters from any webbrowser (rather than installing all the software from CVS...)
- Make a version of the software for J2ME (java) or Symbian (C++)?
- Just an idea: Make a wxWindows version of the app, which should allow one set of source to be built for lots of desktop and handheld devices running all kinds of operating systems
- Add more games, including a way of choosing characters to practise on
Feedback
If you have any suggestions, ideas, bug reports, bug fixes or patches, I'm all ears, check out the mailing list.
Thomas Munro <munro at ip9 dot org> (see my software page)
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