Hanzi Writer Japanese Data

This is a fork of chanind/hanzi-writer-data-jp.

About

This is the character data used by Hanzi Writer for Japanese.

This data is published in a separate repo from Hanzi Writer for the following reasons:

• This data is licensed separately from the Hanzi Writer source code.
• This allows users who wish to import character data in NPM to do so without forcing everyone to download the character data along with Hanzi Writer.
• Publishing on NPM makes this data available on the unpkg CDN, so data can be loaded via, for instance, https://unpkg.com/@k1low/hanzi-writer-data-jp@latest/私.json.

Check out chanind.github.io/hanzi-writer for more info about Hanzi Writer.

Demo

https://k1low.github.io/hanzi-writer-data-jp/

Usage

Until this is supported directly in Hanzi Writer, you'll need to use a custom charDataLoader function to use this data in Hanzi Writer. An example of how you can do that using fetch and the content on unpkg is shown below:

HanziWriter.create('target-div', '私', {
  width: 400,
  height: 400,
  charDataLoader: (char, onLoad, onError) => {
    fetch(`https://unpkg.com/@k1low/hanzi-writer-data-jp@latest/${char}.json`)
      .then(res => res.json())
      .then(onLoad)
      .catch(onError);
  }
})

Notes on stroke count

Some characters may have more strokes in the data than their standard stroke count. This is because the upstream animCJK project splits a single stroke into multiple paths for animation purposes (e.g., to control the drawing direction on curves). For example, 「あ」 is 3 strokes but has 4 strokes in the data. This is intentional and not a bug.

Notes on Arabic numerals

Arabic numeral data (half-width 0-9 and full-width ０-９) comes from animNumber, whose glyphs are based on Klee One. stroke_data_parser.py applies a uniform affine transform (NUMBER_SCALE = 1.0, anchored at the canvas x-center and at the digit's natural bottom y=12) to every animNumber entry, which is effectively a Y translation that lands each digit's bottom at y≈1 (matching 漢). The digit height is ≈86% of 漢 so digits and kanji line up visually within the shared 1024×1024 viewBox. The same transform is applied to both strokes and medians.

Notes on kanji modifications for Japanese elementary writing practice

A small number of kanji are sourced from subAnimJ instead of animCJK. subAnimJ is a deterministic modification of animCJK's graphicsJa.txt tailored for Japanese elementary school writing practice (for example, extending the middle horizontal of 日 / 田 to meet adjacent strokes). When a character exists in both animCJK and subAnimJ, stroke_data_parser.py uses the subAnimJ entry.

Notes on regenerating data on macOS

Running python3 stroke_data_parser.py on macOS produces a working tree diff against many CJK Compatibility Ideograph (U+F900-U+FAFF) JSON files (e.g., data/侮.json, data/海.json). This is caused by APFS NFC normalizing filenames, so data/侮.json (U+F9D6) collides with data/侮.json (U+4FAE) on disk. The parser already skips U+F900-U+FAFF entries on macOS to avoid corrupting the Unified Ideograph files, but the existing CI-generated U+F900-U+FAFF files in the repo still appear "modified" locally. These diffs are spurious and should not be committed; only CI on Linux can regenerate them correctly.

Current limitations compared with the Chinese data

• This data does not support radicals yet
• This data does not have capped strokes, so there are sharp edges where strokes intersect

License

This data comes from animCJK and the Make Me A Hanzi project, which extracted the data from fonts by Arphic Technology, a Taiwanese font forge that released their work under a permissive license in 1999. You can redistribute and/or modify this data under the terms of the Arphic Public License as published by Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. A copy of this license can be found in ARPHICPL.TXT.

AnimCJK's data is licensed under LGPL. You can redistribute and/or modify these files under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the license, or (at your option) any later version. You should have received a copy of this license (the file "LGPL.txt") along with these files; if not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Arabic numeral data (half-width 0-9 and full-width ０-９) is derived from animNumber, whose glyph outlines are derived and modified from Klee One Regular by Fontworks Inc. Klee One is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Modified kanji entries (sourced from subAnimJ) are derived from animCJK and inherit the Arphic Public License.