Interactive system for handwritten-style font generation

People enjoy using a characteristic font to reflect their individual handwriting, because typical fonts used in document creation with a word processor and on the Internet are uniform and lack individuality. Since many characters are used in the Japanese language, it is very difficult to generate a font for an individual. This paper describes a generation method for a handwritten-style font that reflects an individual's handwriting. A font set is generated from a user's input strokes, which correspond to one or more reference strokes. A compression method generates the reference strokes from the original input strokes by using vector quantization. The font is also applicable to characters that include connected strokes. A Fourier descriptor is applied to connect each stroke and construct a smoothly connected line. The cost incurred to generate a font for a user is low, as the font is interactively generated on demand using several parameters. A strongly individual font, a standard font, and a font that includes many connected strokes are generated on the user's demand. Two evaluation experiments involving 14 subjects show that a generated font reflects user's individual handwriting, using both subjective and objective criteria.