Mojikyō
(), also known by its full name , is a character encoding scheme. The , which published the character set, also published computer software and TrueType fonts to accompany it. The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by , originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROMs sold in Kinokuniya stores. Conceptualized in 1996, the first version of the CD-ROM was released in July 1997. For a time, the Mojikyō Institute also offered a web subscription, termed " WEB" (), which had more up-to-date characters. , Mojikyō encoded 174,975 characters. Among those, 150,366 characters (86%) then belonged to the extended Chinese–Japanese–Korean–Vietnamese (CJKV) family. Many of Mojikyō's characters are considered obsolete or obscure, and are not encoded by any other character set, including the most widely used international text encoding standard, Unicode. Originally a paid proprietary software product, as of 2015, the Mojikyō Institute began to upload its latest releases to Internet Archive as freeware, as a memorial to honor one of its developers, , who died that year. On December 15, 2018, version 4.0 was released. The next day, Ishikawa announced that without Furuya this would be the final release of Mojikyō. Premise The encoding was created to provide a complete index of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters. It also encodes a large number of characters in ancient scripts, such as the oracle bone script, the seal script, and Sanskrit (Siddhaṃ). For many characters, it is the only character encoding to encode them, and its data is often used as a starting point for Unicode proposals. However, has much looser standards than Unicode for encoding, which leads to have many encoded glyphs of dubious, or even unintentionally fictional, origin. As such, while many non-Unicode characters are suitable for addition to Unicode, not all can become Unicode characters, due to the differing standards of evidence required by each. Composition The fonts () are TrueType fonts that come in a ZIP file and are each around 25 megabytes; the different fonts contain different numbers of characters. Also included is a Windows executable that implements a graphical character map, the " Character Map" (), . allows users to browse through the fonts, and copy and paste characters in lieu of typing them on the keyboard. As opposed to the regular Windows character map, or for that matter KCharSelect, which both support TrueType fonts, displays the numbered encoding slot of the requested character. In order for to work, all fonts must be installed. Encoding When referring to a character encoded in , the format MJXXXXXX is often used, similar to the U+XXXX format used for Unicode. For example, hentaigana has encoding MJ090007 and Unicode encoding U+1B008. A difference, however, is that encodings displayed this way are decimal, while Unicode's U+ encoding is hexadecimal. From the earliest days of Unicode, has both influenced—and been influenced by—the standard. Glyphs originating from first appear in a proposal to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG), which is responsible for maintaining all CJK blocks in Unicode, on 18