A User Friendly Outline Font Generator for Chinese Characters

摘要

This tool has been developed to facilitate the production of typography quality outline fonts for Chinese Characters for use on computerized integrated prepress systems. In the future all printing will be prepared on such systems, which need little man power and produce camera ready output on laser printers or film recorders. They consist of the three parts: Line art, typography and image processing. For alphabetical writing systems hundreds of fonts are available.rnOutline descriptions for Chinese characters have been produced as early as 1985 (1) but their production is a laborious process. Certainly, many font descriptions will be produced in the years to come. Details of their internal specifications (width and height information, spacing, etc.) will be different from those for alphabetical letters, but the use of Bezier curves and straight lines for the outlines will be the same. Their purpose is only quality, not speed during their generation in the laser printer. Therefore, they are not used for character generation "on the fly" in a word processor. But they can be used to produce bitmap representations in a certain size to be cached in memory for later and speedier reuse in a word processor or laser printer. The PostScript font machinery does something similar.rnThis tool intends to make the production of outline fonts easier. It is a prototype with all basic functions of the final product operational. Use in a production environment will provide input for desired enhancements and GUI improvements. Much care has been taken to keep the GUI as simple and "right to the feel" as possible, not overloading the user with too many options, and still providing enough useful ones. It is implemented in an Object Oriented fashion in C++ on a UNIX platform using X and Motif. This will allow easy changing and updating of the software.