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Re: A Pictographic system that makes fonts obsolete

From:Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>
Date:Friday, December 12, 2003, 4:09
Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> 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 > :) .
Another way of doing it could be to define an XML syntax for Piktok glyph-description, and use XSLT to convert it to SVG for display.