Started July 2008 · Early personal project; open source
I started this project because I wanted to spend time with Chinese calligraphy in a hands-on way. I began with characters from Lanting Xu, turning them into vector files one by one. The work meant deciding which marks were part of the brush strokes and which were noise in the scanned image.
I used Inkscape to trace the characters and saved them as SVG files. I also wrote a Python tool to arrange those files into custom practice copybooks, with options for layout and grid lines.
Calligraphy as reusable SVG files
The repository contains the vectorized characters, the copybook script and example output. The character collection is incomplete; this was an early personal project, rather than a finished library of calligraphy.