Ideographic Description Characters

Ideographic Description Characters is a Unicode block containing graphic characters used for describing CJK ideographs. They are not intended to provide a mechanism for the composition of complex characters, whether already encoded or not.

Going back to the basics, what is CJK? In the context of internationalisation, it is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, which include Chinese characters. Ok, this is now clear.

The Chinese character description languages are several proposed languages to most accurately and completely describe Chinese (or CJK) characters and information such as their

• list of components
• list of strokes (basic and complex)
• order
• the location of each of them on a background empty square.

They are designed to overcome the inherent lack of information within a bitmap description. This enriched information can be used to identify variants of characters that are unified into one code point by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, as well as to provide an alternative form of encoding for rare characters that do not yet have a standardized encoding in Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646. Many aim to work for Kaishu style and Song style, as well as to provide the character's internal structure which can be used for easier look-up of a character by indexing the character's internal make-up and cross-referencing among similar characters.