Introduction

Inkstone is a mobile-friendly web app for people who want to learn to read and write Mandarin. It's totally free, open-source, and can be used without an Internet connection! Inkstone is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. It has quite a few features:

• Tap for a hint, double-tap for a walkthrough
• Stroke recognition and automatic grading
• Spaced-repetition-based scheduling
• Help pages and stroke-order animations for every character
• Bundled word lists: radicals and all HSK levels
• Settings that give you control over scheduling
• Support for custom word lists

Project History & Fork Notice

This project is a modern fork of the original Inkstone app by Shaunak Kishore.

What changed: The original project was built using the Meteor framework and wrapped as an Android app using Cordova. This modernized version was completely rewritten by Juhász Péter Károly (with the help of Antigravity and DeepSeek) to ditch the heavy legacy dependencies (Meteor, Cordova, jQuery, Underscore) and port the application to a lightning-fast, lightweight Vite + Preact Progressive Web App (PWA).

All user data and spaced-repetition progress is now stored securely in the browser using IndexedDB. The app can be installed directly to your phone's home screen from the browser and works fully offline.

Building and Running from Source

To build and run Inkstone, you will need Node.js installed on your machine.

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:

npm install

2. Start the local development server:

npm run dev

3. Build the production application:

npm run build

This will generate a dist/ directory containing the purely static HTML/JS/CSS files. You can host this dist/ folder on any web server (Nginx, Apache, GitHub Pages, Vercel, etc.) and it will function perfectly.

Open source credits

Inkstone was made possible by a number of other open-source projects:

• MeteorJS
  • Copyright 2011-2016 Meteor Development Group.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • https://www.meteor.com/
• Apache Cordova
  • Copyright 2012, 2013, 2015 The Apache Software Foundation.
  • Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0.
  • https://cordova.apache.org/
• Arphic PL KaitiM GB and UKai
  • Copyright 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd.
  • Licensed under the Arphic Public License.
  • http://www.arphic.com.tw/en/home/index
• Make Me a Hanzi
  • Copyright 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd.; Copyright 2016 Shaunak Kishore.
  • Licensed under the Arphic Public License.
  • https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi
• 100 Common Radicals
  • Copyright 2012 Olle Linge.
  • Free for use with attribution.
  • http://www.hackingchinese.com/kickstart-your-character-learning-with-the-100-most-common-radicals/
• New HSK Word Lists
  • Copyright 2014 alan@hskhsk.com.
  • Free to be copied, distributed, or modified for non-commercial use.
  • http://www.hskhsk.com/word-lists.html
• JavaScript MD5
  • Copyright 2011, Sebastian Tschan.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • https://github.com/blueimp/JavaScript-MD5
• CreateJS
  • Copyright 2014 gskinner.com, inc.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • http://createjs.com/
• Ionicons
  • Copyright 2016 Drifty.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • http://ionicons.com/
• Skritter HTML5
  • Copyright 2015 Inkren Inc.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • https://github.com/skritter/skritter-html5
• Meteoric
  • Copyright 2015 Nick Wientge.
  • Licensed under the MIT License.
  • https://github.com/meteoric/meteor-ionic