This document is about making the font: the Builder app and the engineering behind it.

For demo and info on how to use this font, please visit the JianZiPu Font Website.

The JianZiPu font system is designed for rendering traditional Chinese guqin notation 减字谱 or JianZiPu. The font supports Chinese characters and ASCII input.

The JianZiPu font uses a glyph layering system where each musical notation character is built by combining multiple component glyphs that stack and position themselves relative to each other. So each character is made of a series of glyphs, similar to how an English word is made of a series of letters.

The JZP Font Builder

The font is made in the JZP Font Builder, a web app (app/) served by a small Python server. Everything you design happens there:

• Glyphs: draw, import or trace each component glyph, and see it in words as you go.
• Typing: how each glyph is typed (Latin entries, numbers, 简体 / 繁體), with clash checks.
• Layouts: how the parts of a character sit together, with spacing rules, areas and centering on a live canvas.
• Build & test: build the font and type in it, word by word or as running text.

Start it on your machine:

cd builder
pip install -e .                # once
python3 -m jzpbuild.webserver   # open http://127.0.0.1:5713/

The app needs building once (cd app && npm install && npm run build), and the base font builder/src_font/TW-Kai-98.ttf, which is not in the repo, must be copied in once. Save in the Builder writes the files in builder/inputs/ (design.json, components.csv, svg/), which you then commit. Invited testers use a hosted copy where their work stays in a private draft until it is reviewed; see builder/README.md "Hosted pilot".

The website

site/ is the public font page at jianzipufont.com: a static page that types in the released font. Cloudflare Pages deploys it from main (output directory site, no build command). A new font is published as a release from the local Builder's Release screen: it builds the font into site/JianZiPu.ttf, tags it, and GitHub publishes it on the releases page. See docs/maintainers/releasing.md, and CHANGELOG.md for what each version changed.

The Builder itself runs at builder.jianzipufont.com (see builder/README.md "Hosted pilot").

Contributing

Problems and ideas go in issues; font changes go through the online Builder as Change Requests; code takes pull requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Reviewing, releasing and the service setup are in docs/maintainers/.

Under the hood

The font is built by a Python pipeline in builder/ (no FontForge, no hand-edited feature files). The Builder runs it for you; from the command line it is cd builder && python3 -m jzpbuild (writes builder/JianZiPu.ttf). See builder/README.md for the architecture, the inputs, and how the build is verified (a HarfBuzz shaping regression test against a golden font).

The old manual pipeline (FontForge + scripts.cjs, the .sfd sources and the v3.x backups) lived in src-fontforge/ until 2026-10-18. It is kept in git history under the tag fontforge-final.

License

• The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 with Reserved Font Name "JianZiPu" (see OFL.txt). That covers everything in builder/inputs/ (the glyph outlines in svg/, design.json, components.csv, edge_cases.fea, glyphRename.csv, layouts.json), site/JianZiPu.ttf, builder/tests/JianZiPu.ttf, and any font built from them.
• The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (see LICENSE): builder/jzpbuild/, builder/tests/ (apart from the .ttf above), app/, site/index.html, Dockerfile and supabase/.
• Fonts made with the Builder, and documents set in the font, are not covered by the GPL; the GPL applies to the code, not to what it produces.
• Portions of the font, including the glyph outlines, are derived from TW-Kai (全字庫正楷體), (c) 2023 Ministry of Digital Affairs, Taiwan, from the CNS11643 full repertoire (https://www.cns11643.gov.tw), used under the Open Government Data License, version 1.0 (https://data.gov.tw/license). The TW-Kai base font itself (builder/src_font/TW-Kai-98.ttf) is not in this repository and is not redistributed as is.

Copyright 2021–2026 Nancy Yi Liang, Nellodee LLC.