A serious problem for Chinese information exchange in the Internet era is the sheer number of Chinese characters. Commonly used character encoding systems cannot include all characters, since they are not all catalogued; as a result, fonts cannot possible contain all the characters either. In professional and scholarly documents, unencoded characters arise often. This situation hinders the development of Chinese information exchange: special care must be taken to handle unencoded characters using techniques such as embedding characters as images. This thesis presents a systematic...