Chinese glyph generation by heuristic search

A computer system should desirably support all the characters used by the user, even if some characters are not represented in the standard character encoding scheme(s) used by the system. With the exception of some Chinese characters that are structurally monolithic, most Chinese characters can be regarded as composed of some other character components. Based on this, we devise a set of rules to describe the composition unambiguously in the form of character composition expressions (CCE). We then describe the glyph generation process, which generates the corresponding glyph for a given CCE. The process makes use of glyph beauty evaluation metrics which are based on Chinese calligraphy rules, and uses a beauty evaluation function to guide the search for more nice-looking glyphs through iterations. Our approach can be applied to glyph composition components that correspond to bitmap, vector and outline base fonts, as compared to earlier work which can only use parametric base fonts [1]. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate our approach.