Geometry in Action


Typography

Most fonts are represented these days digitally, as collections of spline curves, together with extra information representing kerning (intercharacter spacing) and "hints" for low-resolution rasterization. Although there does not seem to be a direct connection with the computational geometry community, there are a number of problems that could be addressed here: how to automatically choose spline curves to match a given drawing, how to kern and hint automatically or semi-automatically instead of by eye, and how to use geometric font characteristics to perform intelligent font substitution. There are also interesting computational issues connected with text layout (e.g. Knuth's line breaking algorithm in TeX) but these seem less geometrical.


Part of Geometry in Action, a collection of applications of computational geometry.
David Eppstein, Theory Group, ICS, UC Irvine.

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