Home Page
KanjiVG
Warning: this website is still very poor - we are working to improve it.
KanjiVG is a description of the sinographs (or kanji) used by the Japanese language. For each character, it describes its structure and components up to the strokes types. It also provides a SVG drawing of the character with the right stroke order and direction, allowing to easily create stroke order diagrams, fonts, stroke order animations, etc.
XML description:
SVG drawings:
Download
Here is the latest version of KanjiVG. This file is generated every day, provided there has been a change in the Kanji data. Please be aware that it still contains errors, and therefore should not be used for reference. We would appreciate to receive corrections if you discover a mistake.
Using
First, you may want to understand the format of the file.
The first version of the online data viewer is available! You can check out some examples by clicking on any kanji of this page here (Firefox 3.5 required). For example:
Additionally, Ben Bullock contributed a Perl parser to generate SVG images from KanjiVG data and another online viewer.
Reporting errors
Although a huge amount of work has been invested into making KanjiVG error-free, there are probably many errors remaining in the data. We would really appreciate if you could report them to us. Normally, telling us the kanji where the error resides is sufficient for us to fix it.
Here is a list of incorrect kanji. This page is freely editable, so please feel free to add mistakes as you find them.
And a list of missing kanji.
Some conventions are being drafted.
Licence
KanjiVG is copyright (c) 2009 Ulrich Apel and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Contact
You can use our Google Group in order to report mistakes, or discuss anything related to KanjiVG.
Related Projects
- The GlyphWiki uses a dedicated language and generation engine to describe and generate kanji.