Automatic Stroke Extraction and Stroke Ordering Based on TrueType Font

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest a method that extracts strokes of Chinese characters and orders them automatically based on glyph data from TrueType Font. TrueType Font contains glyph of characters whose format is a series of bézier curves and they are arranged according to a rule. Using clues, we extract the vectors which consist of each stoke and reconstruct each stroke to the format similar to a TrueType Font. In addition, we label every stroke and define the orders of strokes using stroke labels and indicate the relations among them. Because all of the processes are performed automatically, we can minimize the time and the effort to make stroke database of Chinese characters. Moreover, because the final data has vector graphics format, it can be applied to the study of graphical contents using glyphs as well as to simple font generation for the Chinese education.