Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

En réponse à Gary Shannon :


>Thanks for the ideas.  I'll have a look. Is the source
>code for METAFONT available?
Not only it is freely available, but I have it somewhere among my files :)) 
(need to check where :))) ). If you want to check it out, I suggest you 
brush up on your Pascal. Like TeX, whose source is also freely available, 
it's written in that language :)) . If you want, I can send it to you as 
soon as I find it :)) .

>  I've had a look at the
>TrueType documentation and it seems to have a lot more
>power than I need for simple glyphs.
That's because a font has to handle things like accents, kerning (putting 
letters closer or further away so that they *look* at equal distance from 
each other), ligatures, etc... Those things need some power to be handled 
correctly :)) .

Fonts are fun to learn about. They are quite a complex, but engaging 
subject (typography is a great art-craft to learn about - which makes me 
think that I still didn't write this post about my comparison between 
typography and conlanging, two arts which have a lot in common -)

>   It might be fun
>to write a word processor that works with my
>pictographs and uses this method of drawing the
>glyphs.
Since you'd basically need to write an interpreter to read glyph source 
files, you could actually write something which would be 
software-independent (since it seems it's the road IMEs are taking. You 
would write a kind of IME basically), which would output something common 
enough (maybe an image in some format) in the clipboard, so that you can 
use that in any word processor you want. The future is in 
language-independent software and internationalisation tools :)) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.