Re: [Devel] ftstroker

[Vadim Plessky]

On Tuesday 17 December 2002 16:59, Graham Asher wrote:
|  David,
|
|  I had a quick look at ftstroker and was very interested - it is directly
|  related to some of my work. From a 5-minute glance at the source I guess
|  that it supports only a circular pen at the moment. Will it (or does it
|  already, if I've been too hasty) one day support arbitrarily rotated
|  elliptical pens, as does METAFONT? METAFONT avoids solving the problem
|  analytically by cunning approximation using a polygonal pen that produces
|  the correct digitised result. Richard J Kinch has solved the problem
|  analytically in his MetaFog program. His paper "MetaFog: Converting
| METAFONT Shapes to Contours" explains this in some detail (though not all
| details are given, and the source of MetaFog is not available) and points
| out that stroking a 3rd-degree (cubic) polynomial curve (the pen, if
| represented this way) along a 3rd-degree curve (the stroke) produces a
| 6th-degree envelope curve; Kinch approximates this closely using 3rd-degree
| curves.
|
|  Slanted elliptical pens give us calligraphic fonts; very nice for East
| Asian scripts.

Such pens are nice for any kind of calligraphic (or calligraphic-like) fonts, 
incl. English and Cyrillic fonts.

On the other hand: I think it's possible to get glyphs's outline using 
FreeType, and apply such pen to stroke/path using some SVG renderer 
(ImageMagick, librsvg2 or upcoming Xr/Xc/xsvg).

Besides:  if we talk about aproximation, I think Sodipodi 
(http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net) may have necessary code.
It has nice feature, called "DynaBrush", and drawing with that brush exactly 
produces calligraphic-like effect.

|
|  Best regards,
|
|  Graham
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Kind Regards,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
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