Somewhat recently (in the past few weeks or so) I noticed that a particular stroke is sometimes behaving differently. See the red circles in the image below. Previously the top dot was always at an angle in Skritter, like in the right kanji. Now the stroke is vertical for some kanji, like the one on the left. Why did this change? Thanks.
imgur.com/aMbHZSk
Sorry for not making the imgur link active. I get an error stating that new users can’t post images.
I guess you are learning Japanese?
If so, these strokes are actually written straight down. There are many more that aren’t yet changed, but most (many?) top strokes in Japanese that are on a horizontal line are straight down vertically.
The correction from the inclined versions is currently work in progress.
Examples of character compounds that are vertical are for example: 立、病、方, 官、広, 卒…
There are some “exceptions” to this “rule”, eg 言 (as the first stroke actually got moved from a horizontal line into a more inclined shape in handwriting)、船…
And characters that have more than one line on top like 学、業、当、党… follow a different rule to determine if there are straight vertical lines.
@susannekaiser I’ve been in contact with Jeremy about some of these stroke inconsistencies. Initially it was about characters containing the the 儿 radical under 冖/宀, like 窺 and 膣, in that the app wouldn’t accept a curved right leg, it just wanted a ﹅ instead. This got me wondering whether this issue is simply one of font variation and style preference, or if there is a fundamental difference between what is commonly accepted between Japanese and Chinese fonts/styles. Do you know whether or not things like the vertical top stroke and this sweeping as opposed to straight leg are simply a matter of style/font difference, or is one or the other generally regarded as incorrect for either Japanese or Chinese?
I’d also just like to add that it would be nice if there was consistency between the character shown after you draw it, and the character you actually draw. I’ve just had 処方箋 come up and the 方 I draw now has the vertical top stroke, whereas the font used at the top of the screen to show the character after it’s been drawn has the slanted ﹅.
Oh, I’m also unsure as to whether or not I should be reporting characters now that they’re being converted to vertical strokes. Like should I report 拉 or not bother?
Hi
From my teacher I know that in Japanese correct handwriting the strokes should be straight down. Japanese people will understand the inclined version obviously, but it is the Chinese writing style.
Regarding the legs, I frankly don’t know.
I second that also the printed kanjis within skritter should ideally have the straight line. Not sure how difficult that’s to implement for the skritter guys.
Jeremy was going to run a program to find more kanjis with these radicals , but it seems that he also appreciates a short heads up when we stumble over these. And there are many!
I am using Skritter for Japanese. I noticed at one point that Skritter didn’t always want to accept the right leg of 儿 but I haven’t noticed that problem recently.
Thanks susannekaiser and ZanDatsu for your replies, appreciate it!
This is bad - I’ve been using Skritter for a year now and I’ve been doing it wrong all this time. The most confusing thing is that it doesn’t accept the slanted stroke now on the ones that are straight down so I often trick myself into thinking it must not start with the 宀 if I’m not completely sure about it 
Then there are the ones that don’t have the vertical stroke at the top (two I’ve found are 宜 and 実), are they just wrong now in the app? That doesn’t give me much confidence, I’d rather something like this was all changed in one go to preserve my sanity - I realise that’s difficult to do since there are so many but it’s quite a significant change IMO. And like ZanDatsu said earlier, I don’t know whether to report them, but it’s worse for me as I don’t even know which ones are wrong!
Hi Rusk, I think the problem here will just be a temporary one as it’s only a matter of time before Jeremy gets round to correcting them all for the Japanese version of the app. I’ve no problem identifying the characters that need to be changed and each day I’ve been forwarding them to Jeremy, so it shouldn’t be too long before he has a comprehensive list of every character needing to be changed. I honestly don’t know how much time it takes to fix each one, but there is quite a lot that haven’t been changed yet and since they are done in batches I assume the majority will be fixed within a few more updates.
I’ve run into the same problem of not knowing whether to draw a vertical line or a dash but it’s a minor thing to try both just to check. Like I said above, this problem is temporary and I think it’ll ultimately make the app a better one for those of us who use it to study Japanese rather than Chinese!
Thanks for the quick reply ZanDatsu, I’m glad you’re helping to get everything sorted. But don’t get me wrong, I’m happy they’re being fixed, it’s the way the fix has been released that I have a problem with. I just don’t think batches are the right way to go here. I think Jeremy should’ve fixed all the ones he knew about in one go (apologies to you Jeremy if you actually did try to do this but there were other reasons you couldn’t), or enlisted your help ZanDatsu (maybe in a closed beta) to catch them all before releasing the update, rather than just fixing a few and releasing it thinking “that’ll do”. Then even if there were a few bugs that’s fine, that’s expected; but as it stands there are currently quite a few that aren’t fixed.
So from my perspective, if I see a character now with the vertical top stroke, then cool, that’s fixed and correct. But if I see one with a slanted top stroke, I can’t say that I actually know that character because I don’t know if it’s meant to be like that or if it’s wrong in the app. That doesn’t really help me learn the characters!
It could be that Jeremy is waiting a while to make sure all characters are accounted for before doing the next update that will (hopefully) cover everything, rather than doing incremental updates, I’m not 100% sure.
In the meantime, and I’m not sure how helpful it might be, but here is a list of the characters I’ve encountered that have yet to be changed:
掟癖章窟魔疹陪俯眩富蛮斎宰抗対親傭縞序交庇窃掠璃齎良疲突廉衰剤部蛇腐富僻塵障境疾防舵穹瀉窪瘤獰錠安流癌唐案康咳恋稿倅寝呟究夜該膣韻商完敵顔斉濠貯痺辞字六統哀轄館癒磨縮肪狩鹿嫡痩旅望倍済変割端嬢痴豪亭凛
I’m sure there are still some not yet included, but if you come across any you aren’t too sure about you could check to see if it’s listed here, and if not you could suggest one that might need to be added.
Also, I don’t think it’s as serious an issue as to question whether or not you actually know a character. With regard to all of the kanji we are talking about here, whether a stroke is slanted or not it is still ultimately the same kanji.
Heya @Rusk!
I’m chugging along, however the character changes unfortunately can’t be released in a single batch at once, unless you mean changing each one without any work breaks in between that is. For instance the changes do need to be uploaded after each character one by one, so if someone happened to download the app data during the middle of them being changed, only the characters that have already been fixed and uploaded at that point would show the change until the local data is later cleared (and after they all get changed). I see what you mean and agree though about it being much nicer scenario of pushing out all the changes at once, if it were possible. All of the characters in question will be changed as soon as I finish making my way through though, and then it shall be a non issue! Thanks in advance for your patience with this.
Hey Jeremy, thanks for getting back to me personally, I didn’t realise that it wasn’t possible to do bulk updates for this sort of thing - that’s great because it means you can get changes out to us quickly, but also scary as it means you mustn’t have any kind of staging environment where you can build everything up and then deploy them all at once, so you’ve gotta be super careful you don’t make any mistakes! But regardless of how you deploy, you’ve managed to build a really rock solid app, and I’m only complaining because I love it and have become pretty reliant on it tbh. Thanks for getting it sorted 
And ZanDatsu, your list looks pretty comprehensive, there aren’t any I saw last night that aren’t on there (and a few more I don’t yet recognise 
) but I’ll keep an eye out for any more. And you’re right, sorry I overreacted a little about knowing the characters, it’s just that it’s become instinctive to do that top stroke slanted now and I’m quite a perfectionist when it comes to getting the strokes the right lengths/angles so I don’t fall into any bad habits early on.
All of my Japanese teachers told me that it doesn’t really matter if it is written vertically or from left to right or from right to left. May be that the fonts are this way, but I think Skritter should be more forgiving on this matter. Right now it is annoying that the stroke is only accepted when it is perfectly vertical.