Subject: Outline Fonts

From: Martin Heijdra <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1993 15:44:43 EDT

I'm sometimes amazed at the energy spent on this listserve to problems
which have been solved long ago, or for information on topics which can
easily be found in the normal press. A case in point is fonts. I would
urge people to read the article on Chinese Fonts in PCWorld-Taiwan,
February 1993. It deals with what is available in Taiwan, but has a good
overview about some not-too-technical issues.

As for fonts, for some the following info might be useful; if there are
typography experts on the listerv, please amend this! This info is part
of a larger info I plan to write on East Asian computer fonts, gathered
from Chinese, Japanese and some Korean magazines.

Next to bitmap fonts there are more types of scalable fonts in Chinese
than for Roman: do NOT confuse words like vector (xiangliang) fonts, outline
fonts or Postscript fonts in the Chinese case! There ARE (very expensive)
high-quality Type-1 (hinted) Postscript fonts for Chinese, mainly for
printer bureaus, and for Macintosh; printing needs special printers. TrueType
fonts are coming. For a Big-5 font, one font might take some 10 MB.
Real Postscript fonts are software and freely usable: i.e. the program, not
a font card can make changes to the characters.

The actual technology of
combining smaller font files (as e.g. a user could create with FontoGrapher
etc.) into one large (say Big-5 or GB) font file is still not open to users:
there are vendor tools available, but we're talking about >$40000 programs here
. For TrueType, in Japan cheaper font tools are becoming available, yet none
too cheap yet. (The same applies to combined bitmap fonts: the cheapest
combination utility (called RollUp tools) are still >$5000.)

However, most Chinese fonts are proprietory in many other senses: they do
not use the usual TrueType or Bezier-Postscript methods completely, or
not at all. In addition to a kind of plotter-fonts, there are fonts in which
a character is composed of adding strokes or pictures to each other: a charac-
ter is then not one outline, but a set of outlines (or even strokes of even
thickness.) This saves much space, and one font can be brought back to
1-2MB, even less in the case of so-called "artificial intelligence fonts",
the latest invention. Quality is less than ideal however.

The actual technology is all proprietory, and a program needs to be specially
written to interface with such a font; changes to character depends on what
the font card etc. can do, NOT what the program can do. A PageMaker using
PostScript fonts would get the outlines, and make changes, say rotation,
to the outline. A program using say DynaFont (Huagang) sends a request for
rotation to the card or font, which takes the outline, makes the change
invisibly to the program, and sends a BITMAP to the program: changes not
supported by the card will result at best in jagged bitmap characters, not
outlines.

Most programs can therefore only use ONE type of fonts, although since DynaFont
is so common, there are Dynafont emulators for eg. Luding fonts. It remains
emulation however, unless the program is rewritten.

Developing fonts of the level required by high-end printers is not a trivial
matter at all, and takes a long time. Japan and to a lesser extent Korea
are just now beginning to support such a market. China has suffered from too
many systems, too many codes, too many font technologies and too much of
a PC (and therefore non-PostScript) environment. When one looks at many
of the fonts available, as e.g. the Yanze proprietory fonts of XinRenLei,
they are simply too ugly to use in high-end publishing. It is NOT something
an individual is advised to do in his free time!

Martin heijdra, Gest Oriental Library, Princeton Univ.