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