KanjiVG contains vector graphics which represent kanji and other characters of the Japanese JIS "level one" and "level two" standards.
The vector graphics are based on Japanese schoolbook fonts The formats of the kanji are those of Japan rather than China, thus the stroke shapes and the stroke order follow the Japanese example in all cases. Please see our reference page for exact details of the fonts and other references used as models.
Since the data was made public around 2008, some additions have been made to the data, such that it now extends to a few characters which do not belong to the level one or two JIS standards. However, all the additions still follow Japanese standards.
Other open source projects exist which cover traditional (Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified (mainland China and Singapore) Chinese characters. Please see the "related projects" link at the left of this page.
The KanjiVG file format is an extension of SVG. KanjiVG files can be opened by any SVG viewer or editor as-is. The shape of each kanji stroke (an individual line) is described as an SVG path on an area of size 109x109 pixels. Since these are vector graphics, they can be rescaled to any convenient size.
The SVG file is organized to reflect both the structure and stroke order of the kanji. See SVG Format for details.
The main graphical data is is based on schoolbook fonts. The exact fonts used as models for the KanjiVG graphical data are listed on the References page.
There is also data for variations of characters and stroke order. See Variants.
In the repository for KanjiVG, each kanji has at least one file which
is given a name of the lower-case hexadecimal Unicode value of the
kanji, padded to five characters with zeros, followed by the
suffix .svg.
The download XML files are created from the individual kanji files, excluding the variant forms. The Python scripts to create the files are in the repository.