Licences and sources

Everything on this site is rendered from fonts and data whose licences permit commercial use. This page lists each one and what it requires.

Fonts

The opentype.jp faces

One typeface here — 衡山毛筆フォント草書 — is by the Japanese calligrapher 青柳衡山 and published by 武蔵システム at opentype.jp, on terms read from the publisher’s own page on 31 August 2026: free to use, commercial use permitted without restriction, usable in logos, publishable in print, and supplied with no warranty. No attribution is required and no notice has to travel with anything made from it. It is credited here anyway. Two more faces, 莫大毛筆 and 正風毛筆, are built from his work by max32002 and released under the OFL.

Required attribution

One typeface here carries a live attribution duty: 全字庫說文解字, under 政府資料開放授權條款第 1 版. The licence’s appendix sets the form of the notice — the supplying body, the year, the name and version of the released data, and the licence sentence with its URL — so the notice is given here in full rather than as a source line. The year is labelled with where it comes from: 2004 is the date recorded inside the font binary’s own version entry, which is the only date this font is evidenced by, and it may or may not be the year the data was released as open data.

數位發展部　[2004(字型檔版本註記日期)]　[全字庫說文解字 TrueType 字型　Version 001.000]
此開放資料依政府資料開放授權條款（Open Government Data License）進行公眾釋出，使用者於遵守本條款各項規定之前提下，得利用之。
政府資料開放授權條款－第1版：https://data.gov.tw/license
來源：CNS11643 中文標準交換碼全字庫網站　https://www.cns11643.gov.tw
本圖像所使用之字型檔已經子集化處理。

Article 4(2) of that licence makes it compatible with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International: attribution given in the manner CC BY 4.0 requires is treated as satisfying it. The notice above is written to meet both, which is why it also states that the font files served here have been subsetted — CC BY 4.0 asks that modifications be indicated.

An exported PNG is a derivative of that open data, and unlike the SIL OFL this licence has no carve-out for documents made with the font, so the notice travels with the image rather than staying on this page. It is reproduced with every seal-script download.

全字庫正楷體 is dual-licensed; this project takes the SIL OFL 1.1 option, which requires no notice, but the source is credited anyway. The other seven faces require nothing.

Data

• Unihan Database — stroke counts, Kangxi radicals and variant mappings. © Unicode, Inc. Used under the Unicode License.
• OpenCC — traditional/simplified conversion at the vocabulary level. Apache 2.0.
• pinyin-pro — Hanyu Pinyin readings. MIT.
• pinyin-to-zhuyin — Zhuyin (Bopomofo) transcription. MIT.
• Chart of Standard Forms of National Characters (常用國字標準字體表), Ministry of Education, Taiwan — used to define which characters the fonts are subsetted to.

What the images you download are licensed under

For seven of the eight typefaces: nothing. The SIL OFL is explicit that artwork produced with an OFL font is not itself bound by the OFL — condition 5 ends “This license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software.” A PNG you export from this site is a document created with the font, so it is yours to use, including commercially, with no condition attached. The opentype.jp cursive face arrives at the same place by a different route: its publisher imposes no conditions on anyone, so there is nothing to pass on.

Seal script is the exception, and it is the only one. 全字庫說文解字 is open government data rather than an OFL font, and 政府資料開放授權條款第 1 版 contains no counterpart to the OFL’s carve-out for documents. Its attribution duty is written over the data 「及後續之衍生物」 — and its subsequent derivatives — which reaches an exported image and anyone you pass that image on to. So if you publish or redistribute a seal-script render, the source notice has to travel with it. The notice is set out in full under Required attribution above; copy it alongside the file. Nothing stops you using seal script commercially — the licence permits that expressly. The condition is naming the source, not asking permission.

The fonts themselves are a different matter. This site does redistribute them: every page loads subsetted WOFF2 files, and a subset is a Modified Version under the OFL. Those files carry their own copyright and licence fields, and the full licence text for each face is served alongside them at /fonts/licences/.

What this site deliberately does not use

• Stroke-order data derived from Arphic fonts (Make Me a Hanzi / Hanzi Writer Data). It is under the Arphic Public License, whose copyleft would extend to anything generated from it. No stroke-order feature ships here, and no exported file passes through it.
• Fonts from free-font aggregator sites, which are frequently pirated commercial faces.
• 崇羲篆體 and 教育部標準楷書, both CC BY-ND — the no-derivatives term is incompatible with vector export.