Xiaoyu Liu The revival of historical Chinese manuscripts presents a persistent tension between faithful restoration and excessive standardization. This project examines the contemporary transformation of Dunhuang sutra scripts into digital typefaces, situating the project within a broader historical trajectory of script regularization from manuscript culture to print and digital systems.
Drawing on materials from Dunhuang manuscripts, the study addresses how stylistic variability, material degradation, and non-standard character forms can be negotiated within current technological and typographic frameworks.
This project is structured around three questions:
- In the presence of physical degradation in historical documents, how can generative technologies be employed to accurately reconstruct calligraphic styles?
- Within the constraints of Unicode encoding, how can OpenType be used to preserve the visual diversity of non-standard and variant characters?
- In cross-cultural contexts, how can a coherent Chinese–Latin matching logic be established for revival typefaces?