Mojikyō
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| Developer(s) | Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川忠久) Tokio Furuya (古家時雄) Mojikyō Institute (文字鏡研究会) |
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| Initial release | 1.0 / July 1997 |
| Final release | 4.0
/ December 15, 2018 |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Size | 51MB |
| Available in | Japanese |
| Type | Character set bundled with fonts and a character map |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | mojikyo |
Mojikyō (Japanese: 文字鏡), also known by its full name Konjaku Mojikyō (今昔文字鏡, lit. '(the) past and present character mirror'), is a character encoding scheme. The Mojikyō Institute (文字鏡研究会, Mojikyō Kenkyūkai), which publishes the character set, also published computer software and TrueType fonts to go along with it. The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川忠久),[1] originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROM by Kinokuniya.[2] Conceptualized in 1996,[3] the first version of the CD-ROM was released in July 1997.[4] For a time, it even offered a web subscription, "Mojikyō WEB" (文字鏡WEB) which had more up-to-date characters.[5]
As of September 2006 it encoded 174,975 characters.[6] Among those, 150,366 characters then belonged to the extended CJKV[note 2] family.[5] Many of the encoded characters are considered obsolete or otherwise obscure, and are not encoded by any other character set, including the international standard, Unicode.
Originally a paid product, as of 2015, the Mojikyō Institute began to upload its latest releases to Internet Archive as freeware,[7] as a memorial to honor one of its developers, Tokio Furuya (古家時雄), who had died that year.[3] On December 15, 2018, version 4.0 was released. The next day, Ishikawa announced that this would be the final release of Mojikyō.[3]
Premise[]
The Mojikyō encoding was created to provide a complete index of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters. It also encodes a large number of characters in ancient scripts, such as the oracle bone script, the seal script, and even Sanskrit (Siddhaṃ). For many characters, it is the only character encoding to encode them, and its data is often used as a starting point for Unicode proposals.[8][9] However, Mojikyō has much looser standards than Unicode for encoding, which leads Mojikyō to have many encoded glyphs of dubious, or even fictional, origin.[10][11] As such, while many unencoded Mojikyō characters are suitable for encoding in Unicode, not all can become Unicode characters, due to the differing standards of evidence required by each.
Composition[]
The Mojikyō fonts (文字鏡フォント) are TrueType fonts that come in a ZIP file and are each around 2–5 megabytes; the different fonts contain different numbers of characters.[note 3] Also included is a Windows executable that implements a character map, the "Mojikyō Character Map" (文字鏡MAP), MOCHRMAP.EXE.[note 4][note 5] This allows the users to browse through the Mojikyō fonts, and copy and paste characters in lieu of typing them on the keyboard. As opposed to the regular Windows character map, or for that matter KCharSelect, which both support TrueType fonts, MOCHRMAP.EXE displays the Mojikyō encoding of the requested character.[12][note 6] In order for MOCHRMAP.EXE to work, all the Mojikyō fonts must be installed for all users (into C:\Windows\Fonts).
Encoding[]
When referring to a character encoded in Mojikyō, the format MJXXXXXX is often used, similar to the U+XXXX format used for Unicode. For example, hentaigana U+1B008