🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1042@mrsvr.UUCP>, hallett@positron.uucp (Jeff Hallett x5163	)
writes:
> My point is that if I bought a bitmap
> font library a while ago, regardless of whether the fonts are "good"
> or "bad" (in someone's opinion - I'll choose mine since I'm the user),
> I would like to have a way to create an outline version to keep up
> with the technology.

I see the point, but I think I see it as more complex.  In particular,
depending on your goal, producing an outline font from a bitmap can range
from trivial to a real hard problem.  On the trivial end, you can of course
produce an outline that corresponds to any bitmap--just outline the bits.
I don't think that's what you meant, though :-).

An outline gains its higher quality from additional information.  One way
to get this information is to generate the outline from a very high resolution
bitmap (scanned in at 300dpi, for example).  Hints are still a problem, but
an automated program could probably do a good enough job for a lot of people.

However, a small bitmap (such as one that was designed for the screen or
the ImageWriter) has much less information.  There are a couple ways to
approach this.  One amounts to magnifiying and smoothing the bitmap the
way the LaserWriter currently does, and then generating an outline from
that.  This doesn't win you any real quality, but it does make things a
little more flexible, especially on printers with drivers that don't support
smoothing.  The second one is the fun but difficult one, and would amount
to an AI program that looked at all of the different sizes of the
bitmaps and tried to deduce an outline font that would generate them.
This is what I think of as converting fonts from bitmap to outline format,
and this is what I don't think will happen very soon or very cheaply.

One thing to look at would be something like Fontographer, which lets you
use a bitmap font as a template which you can trace over.  Even an untutored
human is likely to do a lot better at this that a good program.  It does
take more time, though.

--
Amanda Walker
amanda@intercon.com