hanziR

An R package to show stroke order images and stroke order animations of Chinese characters.

To install and load hanziR, use the install_github function in the devtools package.

devtools::install_github("evancollins1/hanziR")
library(hanziR)

This simple package has two functions and two use cases.

Note: Output visuals have been suppressed for this README.md due to Github’s restriction on CSS code. All output can be viewed in README.html.

Functions

The function draw_static_hanzi produces a stroke order image of the specified Chinese character.

It takes the following input arguments:

hanzi: A character string of one Chinese character (e.g., “你”); no default
width: A character string for width of figure (e.g., “50%” or “50px”); defaults to “100%”
align: A character string for alignment of figure (i.e., “center” or “left”); defaults to “center”
background_color: A character string for figure color in CSS format (i.e., color name, HEX value, RGB value, or RGBA value)

The function draw_animated_hanzi produces a stroke order animation of the specified Chinese character.

It has the same input arguments as draw_static_hanzi.

Use Cases

The first use case is to generate these visuals in R markdown documents. To do this, simply run the hanziR function(s) in a code chunk and set the code chunk knitr arguments to the following: results='asis', message=F.

draw_static_hanzi("陈", width = "15%", align = "center", background_color = "#a86f32")

draw_animated_hanzi("陈", width = "200px", align = "center", background_color = "red")

The second use case is to utilize the hanzi package to generate injectable HTML+CSS code for these visuals. This HTML+CSS code could be useful for having greater flexibility in markdown documents and/or building out web deployments. To view this HTML+CSS code, simply run the functions without setting the knitr code chunk option results='asis'. In other words, simply run the functions in R console or in a code chunk with default options.

draw_animated_hanzi("好", width = "200px", align = "left", background_color = "rgb(154, 50, 168)")

## For markdown visuals, remember to set code chunk argument: {r, results='asis', message=F}

## <left><img src = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/skishore/makemeahanzi/master/svgs/22909.svg' style = 'width:200px; background-color:rgb(154, 50, 168); border-radius: 8%'></left>

References

This package refers to the dictionary of .svg files created from the makemeahanzi project.

Future Directions

In the second version of the hanziR package, I would like to add the following features:

Be able to contiguously graph more than one Chinese character and sync stroke order animations
Be able to repeat stroke order animations and set animation times manually