Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

En réponse à Gary Shannon :


>Toying around with a different way to tell software
>how to draw a pictographic character:
>
>http://fiziwig.com/ptgylph2.html
>
>Fonts may not be the right way to go for pictographic
>languages since they were initially designed for
>alphabetic languages, and have to be coerced into
>fitting ideograms or pictograms.
Basically, what you're describing can be done with METAFONT, once you've 
made a few macros :) . It would just need to be a little more dynamic than 
METAFONT (what about an interpreter for METAFONT? :)) I know tools like 
MakeTeXPK can create METAFONT fonts "on the fly" - or rather at download of 
a .dvi file asking for such a font -, but they are slow - METAFONT 
rendering is of very good quality, and as such slow - and the result is 
just another font, as static as ones compiled before use. The only 
advantage is that if the font doesn't exist yet before you try to view the 
document, you won't get an error. Rather, the font will be created 
automatically - if the sources can be found and some configuration files 
are correctly written :)) -) but it's basically the same thing. In a 
METAFONT source, you also just describe how (in a very general way) glyphs 
are written, which is why with just a modification of a few parameters you 
can get normal, bold, bold extended, slanted, or whatever form of 
characters you want, all from a single source file.

Note that this is no advertisement for METAFONT. Rather, you could look at 
how METAFONT does that, so as to get inspiration on how to implement your 
tool (basically a simpler form of METAFONT, which could make it much 
faster, fast enough for your purpose). An advantage of taking from METAFONT 
would be that your glyph files would be plain text files, thus universal 
(and the rendering engine would just be a simple interpreter). And you 
could build up an already existing syntax, simplifying your work :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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