What "generate a Chinese font" actually means here

There are two very different things people call a Chinese font generator:

1. A text-to-image stylizer. You type 你好, it renders those two characters in a pre-made calligraphy style. Useful for a single graphic. It is not a font — you can't type with it, and it covers only the characters you pasted.
2. A font builder. You give it a sample of handwriting, it produces a font file with thousands of glyphs you can install and type with anywhere. This is what MoFont is.

The hard part of building a true Chinese font is the long tail of rare characters. English needs ~230 glyphs. A usable Simplified Chinese font needs 6,500+, and the rare ones are exactly where naïve generators fall apart. Closing that gap — beautifully — is most of what MoFont does.

How the generator works

1. Write 30–50 characters. We give you a carefully chosen set that captures the structure of your hand: your stroke pressure, your slant, how you close a 口, how you tail a 捺.
2. Upload a photo or write on a tablet. Phone snapshot of paper is fine. So is an iPad with an Apple Pencil.
3. The model learns your hand and synthesises the other ~6,470 glyphs in your style — not copied, generated, consistent with the 30 you wrote.
4. Download OTF + TTF. One hour, give or take. (OTF or TTF? — we give you both.)

The full walkthrough lives in the handwriting-to-font workflow guide.

What you can do with the font

Once installed, it is just a font. Set it as your default in a diary app. Typeset wedding invitations — the use case that started MoFont. Build a small-brand identity in your own hand. Sign documents that look handwritten without scanning a signature every time.

Why it's not free, and why that's the point

There is no subscription, no watermark, and no "upgrade to remove our name from your font." You pay once and the font is yours — see pricing. Training a 6,500-glyph CJK model per person costs real GPU time; a one-time price keeps the incentives honest. We never lock your own handwriting behind a recurring fee.

FAQ

Does it support Traditional Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? Simplified Chinese (6,500+) ships today. Japanese (7,000+) and Korean (2,350+) are in active development. Traditional Chinese is on the roadmap.

Is this a handwriting-to-image tool? No. It outputs a real OTF/TTF font file, not pictures. You can type any character in the font, not only the ones you wrote.

How many characters do I have to write? About 30 to get started, up to ~50 for the sharpest result. You do not write 6,500 — the model generates the rest in your style.

Who builds this? A type designer named Iris Gu (顾砚秋), working from Hangzhou — more about why.