  This paper addresses the automatic generation of a typographic font from a
subset of characters. Specifically, we use a subset of a typographic font to
extrapolate additional characters. Consequently, we obtain a complete font
containing a number of characters sufficient for daily use. The automated
generation of Japanese fonts is in high demand because a Japanese font requires
over 1,000 characters. Unfortunately, professional typographers create most
fonts, resulting in significant financial and time investments for font
generation. The proposed method can be a great aid for font creation because
designers do not need to create the majority of the characters for a new font.
The proposed method uses strokes from given samples for font generation. The
strokes, from which we construct characters, are extracted by exploiting a
character skeleton dataset. This study makes three main contributions: a novel
method of extracting strokes from characters, which is applicable to both
standard fonts and their variations; a fully automated approach for
constructing characters; and a selection method for sample characters. We
demonstrate our proposed method by generating 2,965 characters in 47 fonts.
Objective and subjective evaluations verify that the generated characters are
similar to handmade characters.
