Re: [ft-devel] Stroke fonts - Stroker

[mpsuzuki]

Hi,

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:00:33 +0100
Anders Eriksson <address@hidden> wrote:

>I don't have any knowledge of fonts or FreeType, but I have read about
>Stroke Fonts, which I think is what I am interested in, and FreeType Glyph
>Stroker.

ftstroke.c of freetype2 is a file collecting functions to
compute the borderlines of stroke by given outline bezier
curves, not for stroke based font.

>What I want is that instead of an outline I get one line/single line font,
>the way it's described here:
>http://www.colortune.com/ProductsServices/stroke_fonts.aspx

I guess various font producers around CJK markets have their
own stroke-based font formats, e.g. "Wada-laboratory font project"
collected stroke-based glyph database (but their final product
is standard outline font format: PostScript and TrueType),
Dynalab has their own stroke based font format. However most
of them are closed format, no format specification is disclosed,
so FreeType cannot support such kind of closed stroke based fonts.

>Since we engrave in many languages, not CJK, it would be wonderful if I
>could use Arial Unicode MS and the automatically create Stroke characters
>when rendering.

I guess you want the stroke vector data (instead of outline vector
data) of characters, not the stroke-based font itself
- if I'm misunderstanding, please correct.

>Is this possible, or have I totally misunderstood Stroke Fonts/Characters
>and Stroker?

I think, at least in FreeType, there's no functions to compute
stroke vector data by given outline vector data. In fact, it's
not easy work to compute the suitable stroke by given outline.
I guess you can find more suitable things in bitmap-to-vector
softwares, like autotrace.

However, I don't know anything recommended for you. I've ever
tried to make stroke vector data by hand-written Yi-script,
by autotrace, but result was worse than outline vector data.
Improvement of the algorithm to determine suitable stroke
is required.

https://www.codeblog.org/blog/mpsuzuki/20060710.html

Regards,
mpsuzuki