// the find
LingDong-/qiji-font
齊伋體 - typeface from Ming Dynasty woodblock printed books
A Ming Dynasty typeface extracted from 16th-century woodblock-printed books using a semi-automated pipeline: manual grid annotation, OpenCV contour extraction, neural OCR for character identification, potrace vectorization, and FontForge for final assembly. It covers ~5900 characters sourced from two classical texts. The primary intended use is with wenyan-lang, the classical Chinese programming language.
The extraction pipeline is genuinely clever — using red-channel subtraction to strip annotation ink before thresholding is a practical solution to a real problem with historical scans. The visual centering by pixel weight rather than bounding box produces more optically balanced glyphs. The font is OFL-licensed and ships as ready-to-use font files in Releases, so you don't need to run the pipeline yourself. The glyph sheet (SVG) gives you an immediate visual audit of the entire character set.
Coverage is capped at ~5900 characters from just two books, which is thin for anything beyond classical literature — modern or technical text will hit gaps constantly. Character size inconsistency is acknowledged as a known issue, and it's noticeable enough that the author flagged it for manual tweaking. The OCR step uses an old darknet-based model that the README itself describes as slow, low-accuracy, and a dead end — meaning new character additions are bottlenecked on manual review. The repo has been dormant since late 2022 and is explicitly marked 'work in progress', so the gaps are unlikely to close.