Building a Graphetic Dictionary for Japanese kanji - Character Look-up Based on Brush Strokes or Stroke Groups, and the Display of Kanji as Path Data

Reading and writing Japanese isn't easy for Japanese and foreigners alike. While Japanese learn these skills at school, foreigners should be helped by good teaching material and dictionaries. Kanji lexica have to be very different from other dictionaries. Unfortunately existing lexica normally expect that the users already have a lot of information on a character to look it up---the character's stroke count, its radical or its pronunciation. Beginners normally don't have such information. This project creates data to allow for easier and more flexible look up of Japanese characters and to build better teaching material. It develops different approaches to make use of this data.