The Eight Principles of Yong are used by calligraphers to practice how to write the eight most common strokes in regular script, using the fact that they are all present in the character . It was believed that the frequent practice of these principles as such when beginning one's study could ensure beauty in the Chinese calligrapher's writing.
The Eight Principles are influenced by the Eastern Jin-era Seven Powers () by Lady Wei Shuo. Publications on the principles include:
In addition to these eight common strokes in , there are at least two dozen strokes of combinations which enter in the composition of CJK strokes and by inclusion the CJK characters themselves. Most strokes are encoded in Unicode as symbols, to be used in ideographic description sequences (IDS). The standard characters names assigned in the UCS for these CJK strokes are based on initials of the modern Chinese names (romanized with Pinyin) of component principles with which they are recognized and drawn.