A Hybrid Approach for Stroke-Based Letterform Composition Including Outline-Based Methods

For three decades a number of computer-aided systems have been developed in order to assist in the design of digital type. Even though some of them are used by typographers in commercial type design, they are not yet widely accepted. One reason is the lack of appropriate design metaphors in systems which provide low-level operations (e.g. the manipulation of outlines). Another reason is the lack of essential functionality in high-level approaches (not all characters can be modeled). While these two reasons correspond with the underlying paradigms of those systems, namely the outline and the stroke approach, the presented model provides a synthesis of both. By exploring the high-level semantics of the stroke-based paradigm, letterforms can be composed by individual strokes. Properties like round corners at stroke intersections, as they typically appear in the design of Western type, can be modeled via outline segments attached to the associated stroke elements. As a consequence, Latin characters as well as characters incorporating hand-written characters, like Kanji, can be expressed using a single model. These two classes of types are considered by the typographic community to be fundamentaly different.