qiji-font

Why we included this project

Qiji-font is a digital typeface extracted from scanned pages of Ming Dynasty woodblock-printed books, and the process behind it is worth reading even if you never plan to use the font. The author documents a semi-automatic pipeline that combines OpenCV contour extraction, a neural-net Chinese OCR, and vector tracing to rebuild each glyph, which makes the repository a useful reference for digital humanities work on old printed materials. The downloadable font covers several thousand traditional characters, with simplified forms falling back to traditional ones, so it can render classical Chinese text without much fuss. It also serves as the intended companion typeface for the wenyan-lang classical Chinese programming language, giving it a concrete use case beyond archival curiosity. For anyone digging into OCR-assisted digitization of historical sources, the documented workflow is the real draw.