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I want for an edition project to hide some parts of some characters. the aim is to simulate the idea that a character is about to be written, or is partly written. (in the story, someone had written something on the wall, but for any reason, he couldn't finish the signs, so someone who try to read them finally get some uncompleted signs) These signs/characters will be kanjis, chinese/japanese ideograms.

I am actually working with upTeX (upLaTeX), in vertical writing.

krshk
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  • There is the trimclip package that allows you to clip parts of a character, see e.g. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/486051/194703 for a nice example. –  Nov 19 '19 at 16:59
  • for clipping you could do as @Schrödinger'scat suggests, but if you want to emulate the stroke order of hand writing kanji then that is going to be harder unless you have a font (perhaps a teaching font?) designed for displaying partial characters. – David Carlisle Nov 19 '19 at 19:09
  • What @DavidCarlisle says is certainly true. Yet there may be another possibility. Some tools allow you to retrieve the path of characters. AFAIK asymptote has this, probably also PSTricks, and one may hack TikZ to do that. Once you have that path, you can draw or uncover it bit by bit. Whether or not this is a practical suggestion, I do not know. One of the reasons is that I do not have anything to play with, i.e. I never have used any Chinese/Japanese character in my documents, and I do not know how to get those in. –  Nov 19 '19 at 21:51
  • @Schrödinger'scat and I nearly suggested in my first comment that the OP should ask you to extract the strokes with tikz:-) – David Carlisle Nov 19 '19 at 22:00

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As you said this is for a specific text on a wall in a story I'd be tempted to treat this as a graphical rather than typesetting problem.

I actually just used MS Paint here but any bitmap editor would do. I started with the text (hopefully "Japan") in a suitable font (SimSum here) and then just edit out the strokes one by one. I have no idea of the correct stroke order here, but I made a guess.

These images could then just be included into a document via \includegraphics in the usual way.

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David Carlisle
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  • We should create a ms-paint tag ;-) – Phelype Oleinik Nov 19 '19 at 23:43
  • Unfortunately, it is not really a really a solution, because too random : difficult to finely insert in text, as a part of the text (the aim is not to be a figure), to make it evolve as text, et cetera. But thank you :) – krshk Nov 21 '19 at 07:27
  • @krshk If you, by hand, as here, made an image for each character that you wanted to include, there is no reason why those characters would not behave exactly as text, \includegraphics does not imply it has to be a display figure, it can be used as a single character in word that takes part in line breaking etc. If you want other solutions you should clarify whether clipping rectangular sections of the character is OK or if you do want to omit individual strokes of the kanji. – David Carlisle Nov 21 '19 at 07:55
  • Well, I will give a try. I did a png from a character that I had modified, but now, how to include it properly in the text. As I said, I am actually working with uptex, in vertical writing. I don't see any option in graphicx to first align the picture with the text flow, and nothing to get the exact same size as each character in the current sentence. I am sorry, I am not so familiar with this kind of things... – krshk Nov 23 '19 at 18:13