14. FontCloud: Web Font Service for Personal Handwritten, Ancient, and Unencoded Characters

Text is still the most convenient and important media for people to communicate with others. Nowadays, designers can use various font setting to demonstrate their ideas in text. At the same time, new characters are invented to expand the power of text. However, people have to wait before these characters are encoded in computers and related fonts are released. It is not easy for ordinary users to create fonts, especially of Chinese characters. In this paper, a font cloud offering web font service is presented where users can create their personal fonts easily from the images of characters. These characters images could be scanned from ancient calligraphy works or someone’s handwritings on papers or electronic pads. After preprocessed, these images are vectorized, unified to their codepoints in Unicode, and packed into a user-specified font stored in font cloud. A JavaScript is automatically generated. Users can embed the JavaScript in their web pages to use the font in font cloud and show the designed text effect. The prototype system shows that the proposed font cloud can help users greatly.