Adjusting Font Layout and Classifying Font Style for Cloud-Based Font Service System

Due to the development of technology, more and more services offering personalized products have been emerging, such as customized personal fonts. Handwriting is a miniature of personality and often reflects one’s style. JustFont provides a service for users to customize their own handwriting Chinese fonts. However, the service costs a lot of money and time. Chih-Yin Wang had proposed a Cloud-Based Chinese Font Service to help users create and use customized Chinese font simply and easily. The service is consisted of font creation, management, and application. But there were still some unsolved problems. For example, the handwritten characters are probably too larger or smaller in size, improperly aligned with others, and with strokes of different thickness. Furthermore, the management model is inconvenient in long term for users when the number of handwritten characters is large. In this research, we propose several methods to automatically adjust the layout of the handwriting fonts. A questionnaire was made to assess the adjustment. On average, 82% of respondents agreed that the sizes of the adjusted characters are more appropriate and the thickness of strokes is more consistent. As well, the adjusted characters are better aligned with each other than the original characters. To manage characters, users can assign styles to every character. A classification subsystem was built to help users assign styles to characters. Based on the features extracted from the handwritten characters in the database, a support vector machine (SVM) was trained to assign the character style to a new arrival. In the experiment, when Chinese characters from ten handwriting fonts were used, the classification accuracy of the SVM was 65%. The experiment result shows that the proposed classification subsystem can help users manage their own handwritten characters effectively.