> 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
> :) .