My wife want's to do some stenceling of chinese charaters (common symbols like 'luck' 'love' etc). So I said, "sure I google & print them on transparant sheets for you" but all I can find are some crappy jpg/gif images. Needless to say that these are becoming extremely ugly when scaled up to A3/A4 sizes. Does anyone here have a resource where they have scalable versions ?

I think you're looking for a Kanji font, and an illustration program such as Corel Draw to do the scaling in.

Well, Kanji is Japanese. Although that could be what the computer world calls the font.

When I was still learning Japanese it was very difficult to find what you were talking about, at least for free. I even had a Japanese "word processor" that did an okay job of printing the characters, but still looked pretty bad scaled up. I suppose Google might find something for you, though.

Let me know if you find something. I'd kind of like to do this with some characters as well, while I still remember them

ps-my favorite Japanese character is the one for love ("ai"), just because it looks like a little man with a hat.

Oops, sorry! I don't know what the name is for the chinese character set.

I was just informed that you should try the following and see if it works:

Microsoft Word -> Insert Symbol -> Font: PMingLiU -> Subset: CJK Unified Ideographs

Then you can scale the symbol up to any size you like.

Lemme know if this works?

That's pretty good, Tony! The only downside is that the characters are a bit straight-lined and don't have that caligraphy look, but I'm impressed by the number of characters they jammed into there! I'm not sure how you find the correct one, though I was wondering how they would deal with the sheer number of symbols, as the Chinese has an insane amount. Japanese has fewer, since they got their alphabet from the Chinese but have additional alphabets (to make it easier for American high school students, I assume ).

my favorite Japanese character is the one for love ("ai"), just because it looks like a little man with a hat.

Dammit... English needs a man-with-a-hat letter!

Amazing how you seem to have an answer for the most bizarre questions. Although this is technically a perfect solution I now need some easy way to find the right symbols without getting a serious headache (did you see how many symbols they crammed into that font?). But hey let's make that my spouse's problem it's her 'project' anyway

Thanks for your help, if all goes well the end result may show up on our website which at the moment doesn't really deserve that name. The pictures are just there to support our request for a building permit to get us a new and non-leaking roof. The comments are in dutch for now to make it easy for the people from the city council (who now have a valid excuse to surf the web during office hours). With a bit of luck we should get a 24/7 internet connection within a few weeks after which I hope to run a decent website using gallery from home.

Although this is technically a perfect solution I now need some easy way to find the right symbols without getting a serious headache (did you see how many symbols they crammed into that font?)

Use Babelfish to translate your word into Japanese. Here's "love", for instance: "愛"

(You'll need to set your browser's "character encoding" to UTF-8 to see that character, probably.)

These ideographic characters usually mean the same in Japanese (Kanji) as they are in Chinese (Han), as the Japanese borrowed the whole system from the Chinese in the first place. (The pronunciations are typically different in the two languages though.)

Peter

the Japanese borrowed the whole system from the Chinese in the first place

Are you sure about that? I mean, I said that in my post, but I just said they took the alphabet. As far as I can tell, though, the language is quite different, with not just different pronounciations but different words all together. Or were you just talking about the alphabet its self?

What about 'T'. Thats kind of a hat!