
Zi2zi: Master Chinese Calligraphy with Conditional Adversarial Networks - jiayijeccili
https://kaonashi-tyc.github.io/2017/04/06/zi2zi.html
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lioeters
The animated interpolations between fonts are wonderful to look at, and really
demonstrate the flexibility and legibility of the generated characters.

I've heard that the font selection for Chinese/Japanese is limited due to the
sheer number of characters, and this kind of smart style-transfer could be a
solution for expanding the range of fonts. Amazing work, thank you for
sharing!

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joshvm
Could this be used to generate simple missing characters in Western fonts too?
For example many nice fonts are missing Greek letters (useful for science),
punctuation or diacritics.

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kaonashi-tyc-01
Should have no problem since this model works end-2-end, so only images are
required. However, one worry is that the number of glphys for western language
is significant smaller than eastern Asian languages, the styles to model might
be a lot more than the demonstrated case here which will lead to an explosive
size of discriminator, so some structure change might need to take place
before applying to western alphabet

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yongjik
For some reason the generated Korean characters look adorably old-fashioned.
Maybe the model is generated from old-fashioned Chinese fonts, or maybe the
slight mismatch of strokes evokes the air of old days when everything was done
by hand.

Also it's impressive that the model mostly does a good job of handling circles
(which must be totally absent in Chinese characters).

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k_sze
This is not actually calligraphy (yet). It's just typeface style transfer,
which is an probably an important step towards calligraphy.

To be really calligraphy, you would need to train a NN that controls a robotic
arm holding a brush.

But to be fair, this work is still Pretty. Fucking. Awesome.

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jason_slack
Nice. Thank you for sharing. I'm using OpenAI for something related to
recognizing handwriting.

As someone learning Mandarin, I would love to know where you found these
characters and their meanings. I love to study old characters.

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Pamar
Are you familiar with "Uncle Hanzi"?
([http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?char...](http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E8%BB%8A&submitButton1=Etymology))

I study ShoDo, if you can be a bit more specific about what you are looking
for I can maybe provide some more pointers.

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dnautics
it is neat to see the ML struggle with the circle glyph component from
hangeul; which doesn't exist in kanji (although it seems to handle hiragana,
which it's trained on) fairly well.

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smashed
Just a heads-up because some other people might tell you: In my locale, Zizi
means penis (fr-CA)

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kaonashi-tyc-01
Well, that is just rate R. Let's hail the wonderful ambiguity of languages,
and leave the day as it is :)

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xinyzhang9
Great job for Chinese culture lovers.

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mrcactu5
can this help people who are trying to learn Hanzi of any kind, not just
calligraphy?

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kaonashi-tyc-01
Hi, author here. This project might not really help people that just get to
know Chinese characters. Quite on the contrary, it aims to help typographic
designers who can design a small subset of characters(like 2k out of 40k),
then automatically, if the model works well, get the rest of it.

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dnautics
hey awesome work! in row 8, leftmost column, we see the "food" radical being
laid out using different radical conventions on the ground truth versus the
generated (IIRC, the lhs is simplified and the rhs is traditional?). Elsewhere
we see the "thread" radical being rendered in simplified vs chinese
traditional (but not japanese shinjitai). Have you done any deeper examination
of the activation network to see if there's any sort of correspondence for
some of these characters?

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kaonashi-tyc-01
The source font I am using might have not 100% consistent with some of the
target font, that leads to minor mode collapse. I think that is the reason
here.

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dnautics
it would be cool if there was an activation that consistently flipped between
traditional and simplified!

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mengwei
Nicely done!

