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Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke?

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In article <a8368d38-edb8-4381-8636-2480c12ded93
@k26g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>, mijoryx@yahoo.com says...
 
> I've been reading Knuth's Digital Typography, and I'm curious:
> Does anyone have a way to make variable-width strokes
> (in Postscript, of course) to simulate some of MetaFont's features?

I don't know of any way to do a variable width stroke. Of course you 
could traverse a path, stroking it manually and changing the linewidth 
at each segment, but that doesn't feel like what you want.


> Weren't Multiple-Master Fonts an attempt at a similar parametric-
> font-instantiation capability?

Multiple Masters are a way to create a substitute for a missing font 
which is 'not entirely unlike' the original font. 

This is done by interpolating between a number of 'master' fonts, using 
infromation supplied when the substitute is created. You can only 
interpolate between teh masters present in the font, which gives you a 
number of 'dimensions' you cna move in. So you might have weight (Light 
to UltraBold say) angle etc.

In PDF the FontDescriptor can give you a lot of this information but in 
PostScript thre is no way to supply it, so PostScript interpreters 
wanting to use this feature to create a synthetic font basically need a 
very big list of font names, suitable Multiple Master fonts and 
parameters.

That's a lot of information, which the font foundries didn't publish, so 
not surprisingly it didn't often get done. Also cresating one of these 
fonts is a bit of a nightmare.

Creating the instance of the Multiple Matser at the application end was 
done sometimes, but in order to know hte parameters, you probably need 
the font and if you have the font, why aren't you embedding it ?.....

Finally, it turns out that customers are unhappy when their corporate 
font gets substituted for something 'like' what they asked for, and 
nobody noticed because it wasn't sufficiently different and the printer 
just printed 5,000 copies of the company report :-)



			Ken

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Thread

Possible to do a variable-width stroke? luser- -droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2011-11-08 23:25 -0800
  Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-11-09 08:14 +0000
    Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke? bugbear <bugbear@trim_papermule.co.uk_trim> - 2011-11-09 10:09 +0000
    Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke? luser- -droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2011-11-09 03:44 -0800
      Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke? luser- -droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2011-12-12 01:15 -0800
  Re: Possible to do a variable-width stroke? A D <amd1234@fastmail.com.au> - 2011-11-09 23:06 +1100

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