And another thing: it may be useful to install a brush-stroke-style font, especially if being able to write in Chinese is of concern. Many (most?) Chinese fonts are highly stylised - very rectangular - presumably to make reading on screen easier. Nobody actually writes like this, and I reckon if someone were to do so (e.g. if one copied exactly what one saw on screen), it would actually be considered to be incorrect. These fonts sometimes alter strokes to the point where they're not really the same stroke anymore (e.g. they cross/meet other strokes when they're not meant to, or aren't as long/short compared to other strokes as they're meant to be, or in some cases are just totally different); see this page on Cantonese Sheik for a brief discussion and comparison of computer-style versus script-style fonts. (Note, for example, that in 2 of the characters shown, the computer-style font renders a short top-left-to-bottom-right diagonal stroke as a long left-to-right horizontal stroke.)
(N.B. I'm not a scholar of Chinese or even fluent by any stretch of the imagination, just a semi-illiterate 竹升妹. So I could well be wrong.)
Fonts
Date: 2010-05-04 01:57 pm (UTC)(N.B. I'm not a scholar of Chinese or even fluent by any stretch of the imagination, just a semi-illiterate 竹升妹. So I could well be wrong.)