Mojikyō
Originally a paid product, as of 2015, the Mojikyō Institute began to upload its latest releases to Internet Archive as freeware, as a memorial to honor one of its developers, , who had died that year. On December 15, 2018, version 4.0 was released. The next day, Ishikawa announced that this would be the final release of "Mojikyō". Premise. The encoding was created to provide a complete index of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters. It also encodes a large number of characters in ancient scripts, such as the oracle bone script, the seal script, and Sanskrit (Siddhaṃ). For many characters , it is the only character encoding to encode them, and its data is often used as a starting point for Unicode proposals. However, has much looser standards than Unicode for encoding, which leads to have many encoded glyphs of dubious, or even fictional, origin. As such, while many unencoded characters are suitable for encoding in Unicode, not all can become Unicode characters, due to the differing standards of evidence required by each. Composition. The fonts () are TrueType fonts that come in a ZIP file and are each around 25 megabytes; the different fonts contain different numbers of characters. Also included  is a Windows executable that implements a character map, the " Character Map" (), . This allows the users to browse through the fonts, and copy and paste characters in lieu of typing them on the keyboard. As opposed to the regular Windows character map, or for that matter KCharSelect, which both support TrueType fonts, displays the encoding of the requested character. In order for to work, all the fonts must be installed for all users (into ). Encoding. When referring to a character encoded in , the format MJXXXXXX is often used, similar to the U+XXXX format used for Unicode. For example, "hentaigana" has  encoding MJ090007 and Unicode encoding U+1B008. A difference, however, is that encodings displayed this way are decimal, while Unicode's U+ encoding is hexadecimal. From the earliest days of Unicode, has both influenced and been influenced by the standard—its glyphs first appear in a proposal to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG), which is responsible for all CJK blocks in Unicode, on 18 April 2002. In May 2007, played a minor role in an eventually successful series of proposals to encode the Tangut script in Unicode; already had within its encoding 6,000 Tangut characters by October 2002. The Unicode Standard 's Unihan Database refers to as the "Japanese KOKUJI Collection" (), abbreviated "JK". For example, , an ideograph read in Japanese as , has a J-Source equal to JK-66038. All Unicode characters with a JK-prefixed J-Source originate from . According to Ken Lunde, a subject matter expert in character encodings and East Asian languages, as of Unicode 13.0, 782 ideographs in Unicode originate from , split somewhat evenly between two blocks: CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C, with 367, and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E, with 415. Not all Unicode characters with origins (JK-prefixed J-Sources) have the same representative glyph in  the code chart as in the font; some characters had their shapes changed before final encoding, as investigation showed the shapes assigned by the Mojikyō Institute were wrong. Blocks. it encoded 174,975 characters. Among those, 150,366 characters then belonged to the extended CJKV family. Many of the encoded characters are considered obsolete or otherwise obscure, and are not encoded by any other character set, including the international standard, Unicode. Each character has a unique number, and the characters are organized into blocks. No unification. Unlike Unicode, purposely avoids Han unification; no attempt at compactness of the encoding is made, nor  is there an attempt to keep all common characters below U+FFFF as there is in Unicode. Unicode, on the other hand, sorts its CJK into blocks based on how common they are: the most common are generally put into the Basic Multilingual Plane, while those that are rare or obscure are put into the Astral Planes. For example, Radical 9 has two characters where Unicode has one: MJ054435 (), and MJ059031 (), both represented in Unicode as . License. is proprietary software under a restrictive license. Originally, the Mojikyō Institute tried to prevent its character data from being used, and threatened those who  published conversion tables to and from its character set. In July 2010, the Mojikyō Institute abandoned its legal efforts to stop at least one Japanese user from publishing conversion tables or converting characters encoded in to Unicode or other character sets. Mere data, sometimes including the shapes of letters, are considered in many jurisdictions to be common property as they do not meet the threshold of originality. Due to this legacy, however, disallowed data as of 2020.