Hiragana/Katakana chart

[Ed H]

Just an idea: store all the hiragana/katakana characters and their romanizations, and write a routine to draw them, so that various flashcard/reference programs can be made.

My take on this idea would be to store characters not as bitmaps, but rather as a collection of strokes, which I suppose could be stored as curves+thicknesses. How I'd do this exactly I'm not sure yet... parametric equations? Bezier curves? Doing it this way allows the program to keep track of both stoke order and stroke direction, which is pretty nice.

[cjgone]

In BASIC or assembler?

[Mapar007]

My vote is asm. You can keep memory structures WAY smaller. (BASIC uses minimum 9 bytes...)

[DrDnar]

An 8×8 bitmap will require 8 bytes, and a 16×16 bitmap will require 32 bytes.

If you use cubic Bézier curves, drawing will be slower, and there are several encoding options:

• If you use 16×16 characters, you might be able to get away with using one byte per coordinate pair (%xxxxyyyy format).
  
• Or, you could use one byte per axis, increasing size, but probably giving more flexibility ($xxyy format).
  
• Most applications use quadratic (3 coordinates) or cubic (4 coordinates) Bézier curves.
  
• Cubic with 2-byte coordinates will probably give the best results. Plus, 2-byte coordinates will allow you to scale the characters up for better detail, if the user wants it.
  

Each curve, therefore, could take 3 to 8 bytes. So figure out what size characters you want and how many curves each character will have and decide which will be more space efficient. I think I'd go with bitmaps myself.

Bézier curves, by the way, are usually drawn using parametrics. Wikipedia has the equations. I once wrote a BASIC program that could draw Bézier curves.