Study On Digitalization Of Variant Characters In The Book Of Sound And Meaning Compiled By Hui Lin

The Book of Sound and Meaning compiled by Hui Lin(慧琳), Hui Lin Yin Yi(慧琳音義) for short, is an integrated works annotating all the Buddhist Scripture in the Tang(唐)dynasty by means of sounding and meaning. This book quoted and set out a lot oflanguage materials in the annotation of pronunciation and sense of characters, which hasgreat value in research of linguistics, philologists, lexicography and some other aspects.It’s the demand of the Times to digitize the ancient books, since electronicdocuments in text types are very convenient to read, save, retrieval and research. In theprocess of digitizing ancient books and computer aided study on the history of Chinesenowadays. Nevertheless, there are still many problems about language processingtechnology to be solved urgently, such as the input and search of variant characters.Variant characters are a set of characters which are the same in pronunciation andmeaning, but different in graphemes. A large number of variant forms will occupy somespace in character library which is quite limited. There are totally1,033,722characters,and14,670character species in Hui Lin Yin Yi through statistics and analysis on adigitalized text, which is preserved in the Chinese Grand Buddhist Scripture inscribed byGaoli(高麗). Among the character species, there are3,775variant ones; those variantforms appeared46,331times. The variant character species are divided into2,529variantgroups, including a certain number of variant characters that are very rare in otherdictionaries. It’s typical to create the font by sorting out those variant characters.According to the word frequency of variant characters in Hui Lin Yin Yi, image foreach character is generated by application software like the TrueType character-creationprogram and Font Creator programs, and then variant characters fonts are built by linkingtheir Unicode to the corresponding standard character in TrueType Fonts. It will savespace for character set, make it much easier for inputting and searching of variant characters, and digitizing ancient books. For variant characters in text which areoriginated from the new font, they will be shown in the form of standard characters oncomputers without this font. It will not affect normal reading when the text is displayedon different platforms. Therefore, it’s of great advantage for regulating and digitizingancient books by developing a more comprehensive variant characters font in this way.