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From: jaa@basser.oz (James Ashton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Rounding Corners On Helvetica Fonts.
Message-ID: <2316@basser.oz>
Date: 4 Jul 89 05:37:45 GMT
References: <5665@rpi.edu> <2277@basser.oz> <1863@harlqn.UUCP>
Organization: Dept of Comp Sci, Uni of Sydney, Australia
Lines: 30

In article <1863@harlqn.UUCP> SW@uucp (ScriptWorks Users) writes:
>In article <2277@basser.oz> jaa@basser.oz (James Ashton) writes:
>>In article <5665@rpi.edu> kibo@pawl.rpi.edu (James 'Kibo' Parry) writes:
>>>	Does anyone have a good way for rounding the corners/ends of letters
>>>in a font?  (I.e. to change Helvetica into an approximation of Helvetica
>>>Rounded, etc.)  I suppose a routine that knocked pixels off of corners
>>>would work, if anyone has bothered to program such a thing...
>>
>>If you mean can you do this in postscript, the answer is no...
>
>In fact the answer to the request is that YES you can.  Try sending the
>following bit of PostScript to your printer.
>If the following doesn't work on the LaserWriter then my apologies,
>as I only had time to test it on ScriptWorks.

Well it does work on LaserWriters and I have to admit that it does the
job quite neatly.  The only trouble with it is that the resulting font
is much bolder than the original.  Using this method, the more the
corners are to be rounded, the bolder the characters become.  If (as I
mentioned in my original posting) Helvetica was a stroked font then
this could be avoided.  My guess is that the original requester wants
the rounding done without the enlarging effect and, if this is the
case, my claim that it cannot be done stands.  The only way around
would be to write some routine to `shrink paths'.  This is theoretically
possible in PostScript except that using pathforall with a path
created by charpath is disallowed for security reasons. :-(  Also
I would not like to have to write the routine as it is a non trivial
thing to do.

						James Ashton.