Font Changelog
OracularDigital
Platform
A professionally designed platform that focuses on using digital technology to faciliate the relevant academic research related to oracle bones. Currently launched stage-one projects including a ultra-high-resolution oracle bone font, an intelligent IDE text editor for inputing character transcriptions and various data visualization modules.
Font Features
Electronic Character Compilation
'Jingyuan Oracle Bone Font' mainly establishes on academic works such as 'Jiagu wenzibian' ,'Xin jiaguwen bian' and is also cross-referenced to a large number of original rubbings to implement a meticulous inclusion of 50,000+ oracle bone graphs. Additionally, the font also absorbed some major character decipherment literature published in the recent decade and performed thousands of entries of edits in terms of character grouping, incorrect tracing errors based on old character compilation works, the end result of which is the proximation of the font's utilities as a brand-new electronic character compilation.
Vector-based Design
Unlike to any of the past character compilation works or character image database, the current oracle bone font was created based on vector image techniques. Compared to the PNG-based file formats, the vectors used in the font can save a tremendous amount of storage space. Take a rendered image of 2048*2048 pixels for an example, a number of 50,000 graphs in PNG formats can take up ~195.31GB storage size, whereas the current font, albeit can be rendered of the same resolution, will only take up ~30MB space, almost 0.00015% in file size compared to the former format.
Semi-Auto Tracing
The implementation of the current font database was achieved by adopting a novel method of using a combination of manual tracing and computer-aided upscale to re-trace and re-upscale huge numbers of graphs published in the old character compilation works, the new graphs resulted from which are clean, noiseless, and anti-aliased and therefore can effectively eliminate problems of unfaithfulness and fuzziness of upscaled images under old methods.
Using the Font
High-res Font Design
The character design of the graphs inside the jingyuan oracle bone font is armed with some dearly desired features such as ultra-high resolution rendering, unpertuded character strokes, and anti-alisaing capacity. The font not only supports the input and display of characters inside various high-end digital devices, but also can be used in a plethora of purposes such as for high-resolution printing, digital book copies, web design where oracle bone graph design and typesetting might be needed.
Wide Range of Unicode Support
The character codepoints included by the Jingyuan Oracle Bone Font effectively covers almost the entirety of discovered Shang oracle bone characters, and part of the Zhou-yuan inscriptions. The font provides support for three levels of character hierachies including 'Graph', 'Subgraph', 'Variant' type, and the input and display of a wide range of oracle bone characters.
Associated Smart Text Editor Support
The website, established on the basis of the launched font, also includes a highly poweful and smart IDE editor for inputing oracle bone inscriptions, which can be used in tandem of the font, in order to aid in the complex issue of transcription making. The editor is intergated with over 1,000 pairs of Strict-Loose character normalizations, the quick matching for character alternative forms, pinyin-based character input, component-based character input, lingustic templates and idioms auto-completion, syntax highlighting, bracket matching and hover-event detection and callback for data queries - all in all, a productivity-enhancing tool for supporting the input and typing of various character normalizations that are hard to query and the automatic styling conversion.