Report Number: CS-TR-83-974
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: A Chinese Meta-Font
Author: Hobby, John
Author: Guoan, Gu
Date: July 1983
Abstract: METAFONT is Donald E. Knuth's system for alphabet design. The system allows an entire family of fonts or "meta-fonts" to be specified precisely and mathematically so that it can be produced in different sizes and styles for different raster devices. We present a new technique for defining Chinese characters hierarchically with METAFONT. We define METAFONT subroutines for commonly used portions of strokes and then combine some of these into routines for drawing complete strokes. Parameters describe the skeletons of the strokes and the stroke routines are carefully designed to transform themselves appropriately. This allows us to handle all of the basic strokes with only 14 different routines. The stroke routines in turn are used to build up groups of strokes and radicals. Special routines for positioning control points ensure that the strokes will join properly in a variety of different styles. The radical routines are parameterized to allow them to be placed at different locations in the typeface and to allow for adjusting their size and shape. Key points are positioned relative to the bounding box for the radical, and the special positioning routines find other points that must be passed to the stroke routines. We use this method to design high quality Song style characters. Global parameters control the style, and we show how these can be used to create Song and Long Song from the same designs. Other settings can produce other familiar styles or even new styles. We show how it is possible to create completely different styles, such as Bold style, merely by substituting different stroke routines. The global parameters can be used to augment simple scaling by altering stroke width and other details to account for changes in size. We can adjust stroke widths to help even out the overall darkness of the characters. We also show how it is possible to experiment with new ideas such as adjusting character widths individually. While many of our characters are based on existing designs, the stroke routines facilitate the design of new characters without the need to refer to detailed drawings. The skeletal parameters and special positioning routines make it easy to position the strokes properly. In our previous paper, in contrast to this, we parameterized the strokes according to their boundaries and copied an existing design. The previous approach made it very difficult to create different styles with the same METAFONT program.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/83/974/CS-TR-83-974.pdf