Douglas Whitaker's Website

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ZekkenScribe

Working

Working, no update timeline

I've been doing kendo for over three years now; during that time, many beginners have made the transition to wearing bogu and with that transition comes the need to make a zekken. Now, as I was computer-savvy, the job generally fell to me to come up with an image of a person's zekken to send along with their bogu order (lest any mistakes stemming from hand-drawn zekken happen). This, however, was tedious and not very enjoyable.

Knowing that I wouldn't always be around the Gator Kendo Club to help out with this coupled with a desire to make a (at least marginally) useful program, I set out to write a cross-platform program to aid in the creation of zekken images. The features are pretty straight-forward, but they get the job done.

Features:

Pick katakana from a table, both monographs and digraphs
Fields for Latin name and dojo name
Save zekken as a .png

All the files related to the project are below. By and large, most people should want to download ZekkenScribe.jar, the 33 KB file. This program should be sufficient for most users. However, in early testing, there were reports from users on Windows XP with the East Asian Language Pack installed that still could not see any kana in the program; the "Legacy" file was developed to rectify this issue. The massive increase in file size (and decrease in runtime performance) comes from the fact that a free (open source) Japanese font was included in the file (but is not included in the source package until I get a host that provides more than 20 MB of storage space - every little bit of space-saving helps). This font is Sazanami Gothic.

Requirements: Java SE (developed on 1.6, other versions should work), support for Asian fonts.

All files are licensed under the GPLv3 with the exception of the font distributed in the Legacy and Source code packages which is distributed under a 3-clause BSD license.

*File*	*Size*	*MD5 Checksum*
ZekkenScribe	33 KB	53c6e9e2446165ad284eaed4cdb2c4c3
ZekkenScribe (Legacy)	7.72 MB	01d015f1f4d9b85e61914747d01c517b
ZekkenScribe (Source code)	4.63 MB	Coming soon

Future Goals:

Ability to change fonts
Ability to download missing font if needed (eliminate Legacy Branch)
Better about/help sections
Katakana pronounciation
Use of an image file for the center of the zekken
More file formats to choose from
Web applet version