Inkoya

About Inkoya

Inkoya turns an idea into the Chinese character a Chinese reader would actually use for it — and gives you a file you can take away.

Why it exists

Search "chinese symbol for strength" and you get blog listicles, stock-photo pages and emoji databases. None of them give you a usable file, and several give you characters no Chinese speaker would choose. Inkoya covers 1000 concepts, each with three to five real candidate characters, the readings in both Zhuyin and Pinyin, both the traditional and simplified forms, and a plain warning where the obvious choice is the wrong one.

What you get

A transparent PNG at 1000px or 4000px, rendered from the same properly licensed font you see on screen. No account, no watermark, no payment. Everything runs in your browser — this site has no server and stores nothing about you.

Four scripts, honestly

Seal, regular, running and brush, each from a different licensed typeface. Seal script only exists for characters recorded in the 說文解字 around 100 CE, so roughly half of the character set has no seal form at all; where that is true the button is disabled rather than quietly substituting something else. The same applies to the two brush faces, which cover about 85% of the set. Cursive is missing entirely for now — the licensed cursive faces that exist cannot draw traditional characters.

On the warnings

The notes under "Before you commit" are the point of the site. 力 is not inner strength. 情 is not romantic love. 和 is harmony between people, not calm inside one. A character that translates your word is not the same thing as a character that means it.

What is not here yet

Stroke-order animation, worksheet and practice-sheet generation, name seals, and vector SVG export are all planned and none of them ship today. This first release is deliberately small.

Licences →