Data compression of Chinese character patterns

Data compression methods of Chinese character patterns are presented, which are mainly used for the output printing from computer. Various methods have been tried aiming at the smallest amount of data storage, the reproduction of artistic character fonts, and so on. Among others, dot pattern representation is the most popular methods actually used for representing Chinese characters. There are many other methods, such as contour coding, skeleton representation, and syntactic construction from subpatterns. The details of these are explained with a brief introduction of some general properties of Chinese characters per se used in Japan.