The Chinese character description languages are several proposed languages to most accurately and completely describe Chinese (or CJKV) characters and information such their list of components, list of strokes (basic and complex), their order, and the localization of each of them on a background empty square. Work on this is currently led by the CDL of the Wenlin Institute, the SCML, and the Hanglyph languages. They are designed to overcome the inherent lack of information within a bitmap description. This enriched information can be utilized to identify variants of characters that are unified into one code point by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, as well as to provide an alternative form of encoding for rare characters that do not yet have a standardized encoding in Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646. They all aim to work for Kaishu style and Song style, as well as to provide the character's internal structure which can be used for easier look-up of a character by indexing the character's internal make-up and cross-referencing among similar characters.
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Chinese Character Description Language is a font technology, based on XML, co-created by Tom Bishop and Richard Cook for the Wenlin Institute, designed for describing any CJK character, but suitable for describing any glyph.
This XML-based declarative language actually defines the stroke order of each component (a la a radical), as well as assembly of previously-defined components to build up evermore complex characters. Many of these components are characters in their own right, in addition to serving as building-block components.
The background looks like a square of 128 pixels on each side. In this background:
Accordingly, a set of 50 strokes allow one to construct a set of 1,000 components which may in turn be embedded within tens of thousands characters' descriptions. A change in the shape of one of the 50 basic strokes is implicitly applied within each character that embeds that stroke. Likewise, a change to a component is implicitly applied within each character whose assemblage uses that component.
T. Bishop and R. Cook explain this by the words :
As of Spring 2003, over 50,000 Chinese characters had been described via CDL. As of 29 July 2009, 73,254 Chinese characters had been described via CDL.[2]
In 2007, Structural Character Modeling Language was proposed as a different kind of XML-based Chinese-character description language whose positioning is not based on a numerical grid, as CDL and HanGlyph are. The known database of characters whose strokes and components are encoded in SCML is for demonstration-of-principle only; no known effort exists to attempt to encode, say, all of Unicode's CJK characters in SCML.
A Chinese-character description language that is based on the LaTex, TeX, MetaFont, and MetaPost toolsuite.
KanjiVG is a free (CC-by-sa-3.0) Chinese character description language based on SVG, and a wiki system of edition.