FontCrafter: High-Fidelity Element-Driven Artistic Font Creation with Visual In-Context Generation

TL;DR

FontCrafter introduces an element-driven framework for artistic font creation, enabling high-fidelity, controllable, and diverse stylized glyph synthesis through in-context generation and novel style transfer techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents a new element-driven approach with a large dataset, in-context style transfer, and shape control mechanisms for improved artistic font generation.

Findings

Achieves strong zero-shot style transfer performance.

Preserves structural and textural fidelity of reference elements.

Supports flexible style mixture and control.

Abstract

Artistic font generation aims to synthesize stylized glyphs based on a reference style. However, existing approaches suffer from limited style diversity and coarse control. In this work, we explore the potential of element-driven artistic font generation. Elements are the fundamental visual units of a font, serving as reference images for the desired style. Conceptually, we categorize elements into object elements (e.g., flowers or stones) with distinct structures and amorphous elements (e.g., flames or clouds) with unstructured textures. We introduce FontCrafter, an element-driven framework for font creation, and construct a large-scale dataset, ElementFont, which contains diverse element types and high-quality glyph images. However, achieving high-fidelity reconstruction of both texture and structure of reference elements remains challenging. To address this, we propose an in-context generation strategy that treats element images as visual context and uses an inpainting model to transfer element styles into glyph regions at the pixel level. To further control glyph shapes, we design a lightweight Context-aware Mask Adapter (CMA) that injects shape information. Moreover, a training-free attention redirection mechanism enables region-aware style control and suppresses stroke hallucination. In addition, edge repainting is applied to make boundaries more natural. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FontCrafter achieves strong zero-shot generation performance, particularly in preserving structural and textural fidelity, while also supporting flexible controls such as style mixture.