Is there a way to make the stroke order on the more forgiving characters (女,成,右 etc.) more strict? (When I say forgiving, I mean they have multiple accepted writing orders, even though only one is technically correct).

I'm in Japanese, by the way.

女 is talked about here:

http://www.skritter.com/stroke-research

It says that the strokes are interchangeable, so I'm guessing it's as strict as it's gonna get for the time being.

Not sure on the other ones, but I'd imagine they are in similar situations. I honestly get the feeling that 'technically correct' is a somewhat subjective term which relies heavily on which kanji standards camp you subscribe to.

We're actually changing 女 to accept just one order for Chinese; I wonder if we should do that for Japanese, too.

Well, one of the nice things about Japanese is there's only the one standard for 常用漢字, I believe.

I, personally, would really like that. Why do you guys accept all three?

Well, I was going by this:

「漢字の筆順は、原則として一般に通用している常識的なものによっており、行書で筆順が異なる字については、適切な説明を加えていること。」

http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/shotou/kyoukasho/1260042.htm

...which pretty much says to follow the most widely-accepted and commonsense stroke order. Sounds pretty subjective to me, and I haven't yet found any other official government proclamation about stroke order. I figured they were more or less deferring judgement to other sources, such as the ones mentioned in that first link I posted.

Actually, the stroke order page listed above is somewhat out of date. I've been making a whole lot of changes and they haven't been pushed to the live site yet.

Weirdesky, I think we are going to support one single stroke order for 女, although as we are discussing over here: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=135402818&comments=7, it's a little muddy how we accept the last two strokes. Right now I've written the following conclusion into my local copy of the stroke order page:

"since there is strict consensus about this, we are changing it from the previous Skritter standard (all three interchangeable) to strictly supporting the above ordering (shù zhé, wān, héng). This is complicated by the different styles in which 女 is written. In some cases, the heng appears to be a part of the wan, in which case we have used a stroke that can be written in one segment or two. For characters that appear to clearly delineate the two strokes, we adhere to the above order."

According to this article, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/筆順 the Japan MOE had issued a stroke order guideline 「筆順指導の手びき」 in the year 1958. In particular, principle 7 of that guideline specified that the penetrating horizontal stroke should be the last stroke 貫く横画は最後 and the example used is the character 女 .

That's true, but the 筆順指導の手びき hasn't been officially backed since the standards were revised in 1977.

I'm all for the stroke order you mentioned for 女, though. That's how I've always written it, anyway.