AnimHanzi is a tool to display "animated" hanzi (chinese characters).
It uses a repository of svg files that describe how the characters can be displayed stroke by stroke (one linear path per stroke). It is not possible to get a similar result using a common font file because there is no indication of the stroke order nor the direction of the drawing in such a file.
A signifiant part of the svg files come from the repository of another project called kanjiVG. However, kanjiVG is designed for drawing japanese kanji, so its repository doesn't contain simplified chinese characters and doesn't contain many common characters in chinese. This is why another repository called hanziVG is under construction for the animHanzi project to complement kanjiVG.
The home page of AnimHanzi allows to test the display of characters already in one of the two repositories. The engine searchs characters first in hanziVG then in kanjiVG. Just enter some characters (up to three at the same time) in the form at the top of the page. You can also change the speed of the animation, the stroke width and the color of the character. Finally, you can show/hide a grid, show/hide the character itsef using a standard font behind the svg character and show/hide stroke numbers.
Animation is working on most recent browsers. However, making a cross browser tool is not our priority at the moment.
There is also a summary at bottom of the home page that shows what characters are still missing (in red), what characters are defined in hanziVG (in green), what characters are defined in kanjiVG (in grey) and what characters of kanjiVG are redefined in hanziVG for various reasons such as a different stroke order (in blue). By clicking on a green, grey or blue character, one can display it. We are still making many changes in the repository of hanziVG, so it is the reason why such a global archive is not yet available. However, archives for some subsets (such as hsk1, hsk2, …) are already available. These archives contain only characters defined in hanziVG. For characters that are the same in japanese and chinese (as a result they are not redefined in hanziVG), you need to use kanjiVG.
To use both hanziVG and kanjiVG:
There is only one character defined per svg file. The name of the file is merely the unicode of the character (in hexadecimal) concatenated with the ".svg" extention.
The building of the svg files is a very time consuming task. At the moment, they are made one by one. To help us in that task, we are using various tools such as SVG transformations and CJK Decomposition Data. We are looking for methods to automate (at least partially) the process. Our ultimate goal is to make a set of tools that could rebuild all the characters from a minimal set of primary components (in order to be able to change the look of the whole character set with a little effort).
You can use svg files of hanziVG and kanjiVG for your own website if you wish. See the license for details.
Any feedback, suggestion or help are welcome.
François Mizessyn, mizessyn dot francois at orange dot fr, 2016