If you compare the stroke pattern on here with say MDBG Chinese Dictionary it is quite different... which one is right?

It seems to me that MDBG is more day-to-day use and the version on here is perhaps too formal/too much like a computer or does it matter.

Any thoughts appreciated

Thanks

Matt

Hmm, I'm confused. What do you mean by the "stroke pattern"? The stroke order? The font? And this is specifically for 你?

The font used in one of the animations on MDBG is in semi-cursive style, but for a beginner, it's best to do standard strokes like are on Skritter without joining strokes together.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Yea I guess it is a minor point really.

Just that I had learnt to draw Ni - You from MDBG and it is quite different due it's curvasive style to that of the more standard approach here. So what I was doing was not not being recognised at first. I imagine this may apply to a few other characters as well.

I am sure both would be understand though!

Thanks Nick

That's strange. MDBG used to have normal characters in its stroke animations, but now they seem to have switched to the weird cursive style. You can still get normal stroke orders on MDBG for most characters by clicking the other brush (the white one instead of the yellow one). This gives a pop-up with a somewhat ugly GIF animation instead of the smooth Java animation from the yellow brush, but at least it uses normal print-style characters instead of cursive.

I think they've always had a mixture of both, depending on who contributed the animation that they're sourcing (they don't make their own, but instead rely on those from http://ehaton.blogspot.com/, which in turn are made with the EuroAsiaSoftware standard).

I think you have to blame that on me, sorry for that. Many, many years ago I did for fun make the code to create stroke animations. That evolved into a database with around 1600 stroke animations that I used in all sorts of weird software's ( I did actually create an very early Skritter like software based on that). I started euroasiasoftware for those projects. The problem where that I did travel a lot and changed pc frequently and this old version of stroke animations where build on x and y coordinates from a Chinese font. Since it is an open source project many people did help with the animations and some of them did use different fonts. Yes, i regrett not handling that properly. That is why they do not look the same. Still, they are all based on the simplified mandarin we all know. So in short, forget about the stroke animations on MDBG, Yellow bridge, mandarinttols etc since they are build on my old crappy code. The one you have at Skritter is really perfect and standadized. Love them I must say. As for the other version of stroke animations they do have at MDBG they are using an even older animation from Ocrat. That page is since long gone but the animations are saved in some open source comunities. The jumping of the animtion indicates the stroke direction. Hmm, I am actually an IT dinosaur...

Definitely a post that caught me by surprise! Cool to see someone who contributed a whole bunch of stuff (even if it is a bit old now) hanging around Skritter now and appreciating it.

So any chance for the Skritter team contributing back to MDBG and others by giving back newer stroke animations? or in other ways?

Wow, I'm impressed! The poppa of stroke order animations! I use those as reference all the time (although I do check the Ocrat, Wenlin, Nciku, and Taiwan MoE orders, and sometimes the Arch Chinese ones, as well as two little stroke order books). I tip my hat to you, sir.

When we do standalone stroke order animations, we'll have to do something really cool with them. I'm not sure it'll be as easy to plug those into other sites. But if we do plug, you'll probably be able to interact with them in a cool way.

Not sure yet about other methods of sharing our stuff; probably will see what we've got when we start building some small dictionary-like pieces.