"postmodern" tile set has incorrect chinese characters

5 of characters is also shocking

Thanks for your bug. The right place to discuss that is probably upstream or to somebody who has some mahjongg knowledge, which is not likely the case of the people working on the Ubuntu desktop. I've forwarded it upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346340

(I'll comment both here and downstream. Please contact me directly or through gnome bugzilla in the future.)

Simply put, postmodern is closely related more to Japanese tile design, and wasn't much influenced by either Chinese tile design nor the modern standards of writing those characters. Most Chinese sets are rather pedestrian, while Japanese sets are very heavily stylized... I believe that much of it reflects original attempts to mimic brush strokes while carving into bone or other substances.

Outside of postmodern, just compare the typical Japanese set on solperama or goodmj versus the Chinese set in the wikipedia article.
- http://www.goodmj.com/mjtiles.html
- http://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/types.htm
:vs:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong_tiles

I am planning to do a traditional mahjongg tile set, reflecting antique Chinese sets and including features intentionally dropped from Postmodern (1 bams, individual season and flower tiles, etc). These will have the thin-line characters.

If you really want to suggest changes to Postmodern's strokes, simply draw it out or point to a good example that can keep the look and feel of the current set, and I'll see what I can do.

An annotated side-by-side comparison of the differences between the real characters and how they appear on the postmodern set.

Researching this further, the "5 of characters is shocking" comment is not quite accurate; it is simply a variant of the character I was not familiar with, with an extra radical for "Person" left of the main character.

SVG source for above critique.

could you take that upstream rather? that would be the right place to discuss it

This discussion has been taken upstream; first round of suggestions from me are attached.

Ok, I have confirmed with a native Chinese person that the current postmodern set is fine and that the problems I raised are just script style difference. So you can close this bug :)

Thanks for following up.