Hi there

While studying earth branches, I found that 醜 is written in 17 strokes by skritter (with 田), whereas Wenlin uses 16 strokes only (with 鬼). Can anyone explain this to me ?

From here
http://www.skritter.com/resources/stroke_order_research

Are there 9 or 10 strokes in 鬼?

If you are a traditional character purist, you will notice that there is a discrepancy between how this character is written in traditional and simplified fonts. This is because there is actually an extra stroke in the traditional form of this radical inside the top box. Instead of having one large piě stroke, the traditional has a short shù in the box, a héng, and then a piě. Since there are unicode points for this and the radical is common, we support the difference. If you see a character that you don't think has the right style applied, let us know via the contact form on the study page.

The 10 strokes 鬼 is the traditional form. The 9 strokes one is a newer font (新字形
) used in the mainland. Yes, the mainland government does not only promote the simplified characters but also changes the look of a lot of the traditional ones. A list of the other traditional characters that have been modified can be found here: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新字形 .

Also, please note that the traditional form of the 2nd earthly branch is still 丑. 醜 has nothing to do with the earthly branch.

Oh yeah, I was wondering what's the deal with characters like 鬼, 差, 象 etc.
I'd really like to see them in their traditional forms when practicing traditional characters. Since you already got them in Japanese Skritter, it's possible, isn't it?

The system does not support having two different written appearances for the same Unicode point in the same language. The Japanese characters have different styles for the same Unicode point because they're tagged as Japanese, and Japanese gets its own copy of everything.

OK, so are you going to change 醜?

No, because it already has the correct number of strokes for traditional (one extra as compared to how the 鬼 would be written in simplified), as per the stroke research answer above.

I see, so if the 鬼 appears *only* in the traditional variant, it’s a 10-stroke-鬼? I thought you might wanna change it to the 9-stroke-鬼 for the sake of consistency.

Just going by the policy that George determined a while back. It could go either way, but it's not so straightforward to change them, so we'd like to stick with it without a strong reason to make the switch.