I should first point out that you probably meant Han characters (so called "CJK(V) ideographs", an unfortunate misnomer), and many Asian languages do not use th

I should first point out that you probably meant Han characters (so called "CJK(V) ideographs", an unfortunate misnomer), and many Asian languages do not use them at all if we are talking about the number of languages. But yeah, let's talk about strokes first. Almost all Han characters do consist of a small finite number of strokes and the stroke order itself is reasonably canonical... only for a single point of time in one area. There are lots of examples where the stroke order or even the stroke composition itself differ from time to time and among countries. And you won't be able to correctly encode an archaic character which canonical stroke order is not known---you have to guess, and you will be frequently wrong but wouldn't be able to fix that. So the next possibility is something like character description languages [1], and people tried a lot of them, so much that we even have a standardized description sublanguage in Unicode [2]. And again, there are so many possibilities that we can't have a single canonical description. Andrew West has maintained a comprehensive IDS database for all Unicode Han characters [3], and while sometimes the first level of decomposition looks clear (字 is clearly 宀 + 子) subsequent decompositions are much more ambiguous (is 子 atomic or 了 + 一?). Ultimately this approach takes too much work to be worthy, so most standards including Unicode have treated them as atomic characters with a room for glyphic variations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_description_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_description_... [2] But those ideographic description sequences (IDS) are meant to describe characters (like, ⿱丶王 means 丶 over 王) and not equivalent to characters themselves (⿱丶王 doesn't equal to 主). [3] https://babelstone.co.uk/CJK/IDS.TXT https://babelstone.co.uk/CJK/IDS.TXT