What is lxgwseal?

LXGW Seal is a free, open source font project that brings Small Seal Script, an ancient Chinese calligraphy style also called Xiaozhuan, to modern computers. It works with the Small Seal character block added in the Unicode 18.0 standard, so the individual seal script glyphs can be typed and displayed like any other character. Every character in the font must come from a documented source: the classical dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, compiled almost two thousand years ago, which recorded the standard seal script forms of the time. The project does not invent seal script shapes by guessing from modern simplified or traditional characters. Where a later commonly used character differs from its original Shuowen form, the font includes the original and maps it to the modern character people actually type, so it still works in everyday text tools. The font is meant for design work rather than everyday reading. It targets uses like festival greetings, seal carving and stamp designs, and other traditional Chinese cultural graphics, covering themes such as holidays, the twelve animal zodiac signs, the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches, the five elements, and historical dynasty names. It is an early stage project. The current release includes only 75 characters, with a first full version planned to reach around 300, and a long term cap of about 1,000 characters. The maintainer describes it as a personal hobby project with limited ongoing maintenance rather than a professional commercial font product. Font files can be downloaded from the project's Releases page, or built from source using FontCreator software with the included project files. The font is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows free personal and commercial use, bundling into other software, and modification, as long as the license text travels with it and the font is not sold on its own as a standalone file. Certain reserved names tied to the author's other font projects cannot be reused for derivative fonts without permission. In the README, the maintainer notes this is intended as their final open source Chinese font release, citing the heavy time cost of open source font maintenance compared to the return, and plans to shift future personal font work toward original, non open source designs instead.