Wen Quan Yi

The goal of "Wen Quan Yi" Project is to create high-quality open-source bitmap and outline fonts for all CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters. There are about 70,000 Han characters currently encoded by the Unicode Standard 4.0, including the CJK Unified Ideographs (U+4E00~U+9FA5, 20,902 characters), CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A(U+3400~U+4DB5, 6,582 characters), CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (U+20000~U+2A6D6, 42,711 characters), together with many other CJK related unicode blocks.

We develop bitmap CJK fonts for the following reasons: 1) the high-stroke density and complex structures of CJK glyphs create difficulties for hinting algorithms, resulting in blurry and distortions when viewing on the screen, seriously compromising the usability of vector fonts under Linux, hand-hinted bitmap fonts could easily solve this problem, 2) embedded and portable devices have demonstrated increasing demands in high-quality CJK font solutions, 3) drawing bitmap CJK glyphs is an extension of calligraphy in the electronic form and has demonstrated certain characteristics of artistic creations. Tremendous efforts have been invested by our volunteers to create high-quality CJK bitmap glyphs since year 2004 when this project was initiated by FangQ. Nearly 30,000 new glyphs were created from scratch and even more were fine-tuned from the existing open-source font resources. As a result, the WenQuanYi bitmap Wiki today contains glyph data covering the entire CJK basic and CJK Extension A blocks, at multiple glyph sizes (8pt,9pt,10pt,10.5pt,11pt,12pt,14pt). The total glyph number at the WenQuanYi Wiki is more than 180,000. The released bitmap fonts has become one of the most popular CJK fonts being used under various distributions of Linux.

In parallel, commercial quality outline fonts has also been actively developed by contributors since year 2005. Innovative development approach and high-standard quality control makes WenQuanYi outline fonts the most promising direction for open-source CJK typesettings. The outline font development method was proposed by FangQ who also wrote the client/server software for vector glyph creation. His approach is based on stroke-decomposition and reconstruction while taking advantages of the compositional rules of CJK characters. The algorithm and software are capable of creating multiple font styles and posses the maximum flexibilities for manipulating CJK glyphs. The stroke-database is also valuable for information compression, automated semantic recognition, optical-character recognition and hand-writing recognition etc.

A notable distinction between this project and other open-font development efforts is its extensive utilization of Wiki engine for collaborative font glyph creations. Bitmap editing and vector stroke analysis GUIs were written with Javascript and Web2.0 technology with Wiki at the back-end. This open editing environment greatly facilitate the collaborations between contributors. A new Wiki engine, referred to as Wiki2, written by FangQ also approaches its release date, which features object-oriented hierarchical wiki structures, rules and inheritance, plugin modularization etc. The WenQuanYi wiki will be gradually migrate into the new Wiki2 engine and expect to provide more convenient functionalities for font developments.