What is it?
The Stroke Recorder is an online tool i developed for recording kana and kanji stroke animation data that is more flexible and scalable than other ways of displaying stroke animations that were available at the time.
In the system you draw the strokes on top of the character you want to record. The strokes are automatically recorded in the order that you write them. Once a full character has been recorded you can easily fine tune each strokes position, width, order and direction.
The advantage of this system is that the resulting data is "raw data" that can be scaled to any size and sped up or slowed down as use please. The data can easily be stored in a database without requiring much space compared to animated gifs or or flash files.
The disadvantage is that for web usage it requires browsers that support HTML 5 canvas element.
The data can be used to display animations using code. For example via JavaScript as shown here.
Click the character to start the animation
In this example the same data is used to generate a stroke by stroke list of the same character in a mobile application. Having raw data stored in a local database, rather than pre-animated gif or flash files, gives you more options. Not only in size but also in coloring of characters and individual strokes.
