Week 296: This kanji does not exist

Sanshin notation uses kanji as a form of tablature: each glyph corresponds to a unique position on a particular string on the fingerboard. However, some of the characters used to indicate less-common positions higher up the neck use kanji that aren’t used in normal language. When writing, you can create novel kanji by combining any components you wish, but if they don’t have corresponding encodings, you can’t actually represent them on a computer. Even if you could, they don’t necessarily have glyphs in the font you want to use, or perhaps in any font at all. You can fake these kanji by squishing together existing components, so ｲ + 老 looks like ｲ老, and it doesn’t look too bad. But I’m a perfectionist, the shortcomings are more perceptible in print, so I made a complete set of SVG versions of the kanji used for sanshin notation, including all the characters that don’t exist in fonts, in Unicode, or in any other context. Some of the kanji Maybe I should see about trying to get these…