Sources & Credits

The Chopmark Lookup tool relies on character data, fonts, and software from a number of open projects. Thank you to everyone who has made their work freely available.

Character data

• Unihan Database (© Unicode, Inc.) — pinyin readings and English definitions
• KANJIDIC2 — the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (Jim Breen / Monash University) — Japanese on'yomi and kun'yomi readings, English meanings, and jōyō / jinmeiyō classifications used by the Japanese library. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

Modern Hanzi & Japanese glyphs

• Noto Sans CJK (Google) — the SC variant for Hanzi forms and the JP variant for Japanese kanji & kana forms
• Noto Sans Mongolian (Google) — the upright vertical glyphs for Manchu-script chopmarks (the one font shipped to your browser as a webfont, rather than rendered to images)
• Plangothic
• LXGW WenKai

All four font families are distributed under the SIL Open Font License.

Seal, Bronze, Oracle, and Liushutong script forms

• hanziyuan.net — Richard Sears' "Uncle Hanzi" project, a remarkable freely-shared paleographic character database
• Academia Sinica's 小學堂 (xiaoxue) — Chongxi seal script glyphs
• Wikimedia Commons contributors — additional ancient-script SVGs

Calligraphy script forms (running, grass, and clerical, shown in the Direct Lookup tool and the Top 100 Chopmarks page)

• Zhi Mang Xing (Wei Zhimang) and Long Cang (Chen Xiaomin): running script, via Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License
• Liu Jian Mao Cao (Liu Zhengjiang): grass script, Google Fonts (SIL Open Font License)
• 青柳隷書 (Aoyagi Reisho) and 衡山毛筆フォント行書 / 草書 (Kouzan Gyōsho and Sōsho), by calligrapher Aoyagi Kouzan (digitized by Shimo, 武蔵システム): clerical, running, and grass forms, free for any use
• 草书 (Caoshu), a wild-cursive (狂草) font by mikhailcai modeled on the Tang master Sun Guoting (孙过庭): grass script; the author has waived copyright and it is free for any use
• 书体坊文征明行草 (Wen Zhengming running-cursive), digitized by 书体坊 / Founder after the Ming master Wen Zhengming (文徵明): a legible cursive hand, used here only as rendered glyph images
• HanWang LiSu (王漢宗中隸書), the free fonts of Prof. Hann-Tzong Wang: clerical script (GPL)
• UnYetgul (은예글), Un Koaunghi / Un Fonts: clerical hanja (GPL)

These calligraphy fonts are used only as rendered glyph images on the page, never redistributed as font files.

Build tools

• fontkit — glyph outline extraction
• @napi-rs/canvas — server-side image rasterization
• subset-font — webfont subsetting