Automatic Generation of Typographic Font from a Small Font Subset
Which is a mouthful. But pretty neat. This research by Tomo Miyazaki, Tatsunori Tsuchiya, Yoshihiro Sugaya, Shinichiro Omachi, Masakazu Iwamura, Seiichi Uchida, and Koichi Kise is exactly the kind of centaur-aid design tool that I want to see procedural generation used for.
Instead of designing a font by hand, the designers can design a few and generalize to many more. Which is important if you want to speed up the design of kanji characters. As they mention in the paper, with thousands of characters to create, a professional designer can take years to make a single font for CJK languages.
Interestingly, they’re using images as source data rather than vectors, which are more usual. They say they chose to do this because it’s much easier to acquire image data for new characters, whereas vector data usually needs to be constructed.
It still needs a vector skeleton to work off of, so totally novel characters need to be annotated manually. Though they’re using the GlyphWiki dataset of 270,000 characters as a base, so they may have the character you’re looking for already.