From: info@curvesoft.com
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: TclFont -- A stroke font in TCL
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 01:59:41 GMT
Organization: CurveSoft, Inc.
Approved: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov (Mikko Rauhala)
Message-ID: <pycola.918957581.30237@revelation.bak.helsinki.fi>
Reply-To: info@curvesoft.com
Keywords: tcl stroke font scalable
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Xref: sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk comp.os.linux.announce:12162

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CurveSoft is pleased to announce the release of TclFont under the terms
and conditions of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation. Get it from: 

    http://www.curvesoft.com/tools.html

TclFont is technology for creation, display and printing of scalable
_stroke_ fonts defined as TCL scripts. It consists of 4 parts:
(a) A sample stroke font named 'Pencil' where each glyph is defined by
    a small TCL procedure. Two types of strokes are currently supported:
    straight lines and conic curves. Pencil includes almost all the
    ISO-8859 glyphs with the exception of a couple of ligatures. The
    design is Courier-like though variable width.
(b) A set of C++ files which allow stroke fonts to be arbitrarily scaled
    and displayed on the screen. The pen diameter can also be varied.
(c) A set of TCL procedures for creating a downloadable scalable
    PostScript Type 3 font from a stroke font (currently this requires
    at least a Level 2 RIP since it uses the 'strokeadjust' operator to
    keep stroke widths uniform).
(d) A set of TCL procedures for a large size display of single glyphs
    (this is useful when creating new glyphs).

TclFont should be regarded as experimental since it has received only
limited testing. The C++ code should be 64-bit clean since it has been
tested on Linux-Alpha.

TclFont, as currently implemented, uses strokes of uniform width and
so is not as flexible as outline fonts such as PS Type 1 or TrueType
when it comes to shape definition (for example, flaring serifs or stems
are not possible). Anti-aliasing is not yet implemented.

However, it has a number of compensating advantages:

- -- The quality of bitmaps generated by the scaler, though not as good as
   hand-tuned ones, is reasonable even down to screen resolutions
   despite the fact that no hints are used. The two most significant
   uses of hints in outline fonts are to ensure uniformity of character
   heights and stem widths at low resolutions. These are automatic in
   TclFont. By contrast, many vendors of hinted outline fonts supply
   hand tuned bitmaps for specific sizes for screen fonts since even
   with hints, the quality of bitmaps generated by outline font scalers
   is poor at screen resolutions.

- -- The font itself is implemented as a TCL script so users can easily
   add special purpose characters by writing a few lines of TCL; in
   addition, the full panoply of tcl commands is available. For example,
   TCL procs can be used to ensure that parts of characters that should
   be identical are in fact so (this is similar to the /Subrs array in
   the Private dictionary of a PS Type 1 font).

- -- Many of the features of "Multiple Master" fonts are available. For
   example,
   (a) using a larger stroke width (i.e. pen diameter) yields a bolder
       font;
   (b) scaling the font horizontally yields a wider font; with outline
       fonts, this causes a potential problem since vertical
       stems are thickened but horizontal stems have the same thickness
       when the font is scaled horizontally. In TclFont, the stroke
       width is independent of the font scale factors.
   (c) changing font characteristics such as x-height, cap-height etc.
       is as simple as changing a few TCL variables.
   (d) common features such as serif lengths can also be varied easily
       by changing TCL variables, if the font is designed with this
       capability in mind.

- -- the glyph codes are 32-bit values, so a font can contain a very
   large number of glyphs.

Comments, suggestions for improvement etc. can be sent to
info@curvesoft.com; though we cannot guarantee a response, if time
permits, we will try to reply to all email correspondence.
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