A Heuristic Search Approach to Chinese Glyph Generation Using Hierarchical Character Composition

When some Chinese characters used by the user are not represented in the standard character encoding scheme of a computer system, it would be desirable if the system can still support these characters. Based on the hierarchical relationships between character components, we propose structurally based character composition expressions (CCE) for com - posing these unrepresented Chinese characters unambiguously. We then describe a glyph gen- eration process, which generates the corresponding glyph for a given CCE. The process makes use of glyph beauty evaluation metrics which are based on traditional Chinese calligraphy rules, and uses a beauty evaluation function to guide the search for nice-looking glyphs through iterations. Our approach can be applied to glyph composition components that corre - spond to bitmap, vector as well as 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.