Re: [tlug] Creating UTF-8 Fonts

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Uva" == Uva Coder <uva.coder@example.com> writes:

    Uva> Thanks. The task is even tougher when you take
    Uva> inconsideration that we are not interested in
    Uva> anti-aliasing fonts, but rather producing high quality
    Uva> bitmaps that don't require it to look great.

Well, I guess what I would do is write a program that rasterizes each
glyph from a nice OpenType font to a depth 1 bitmap with a series (say
10) of fractional offsets.  Blow up each bitmap pixel to say a
radius-2 "circle", then blit the pixel to the screen at that scale.
Pick up mouse clicks on the glyph and dump the selected bitmap to BDF
format.  You should be able to get 7 rows of 10 variants on a 768x1024
screen for 24 pixel fonts.

I figure if you're not too picky, you should be able to easily process
250 characters/hour.  So for the 10,000 or so characters that a
typical Japanese font would have you'd be looking at 40 hours.  A
similar process just blitting all the glyphs to the screen, selecting
the ugly ones that made it through the first pass, and either using a
bitmap editor or redoing the selection process to repair them and
you'd probably have a passable font in 100 hours total, including
writing the software.

Provide the software with the font and encourage users to submit
improved glyphs, you could have some really nice fonts in a calendar
year.

I don't know if those numbers sound attractive or prohibitive, but
there you go!

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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