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From: micja@IDA.LiU.SE (Michael Jansson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Outline Fonts.
Keywords: fonts, outline, contour, 3d, multicolor.
Message-ID: <1990Aug6.122522.1902@ida.liu.se>
Date: 6 Aug 90 12:25:22 GMT
Sender: Michael Jansson
Organization: CIS Dept, Univ of Linkoping, Sweden
Lines: 81

Hello!

This message is about: contour outline fonts, vectorized
fonts, scalable fonts, multi color fonts and 3d fonts.
Interested? Keep on reading!

As you might have heard there will be scalable bitmap fonts
with Workbench 2.0. That is what I have heard at least.  I
have been working with something more powerful than that
which might interest you. I had this idea of how to render
splines very fast and started to implement a small paint
program that uses this algorithm. It grew and now I have an
amiga library and a font editor that can manage true outline
fonts. Here are some of the characteristics of the fonts and
the editor:

 * Arbitrarily path direction, i.e. the angle of a string on
   the screen.

 * Arbitrarily up direction, i.e. the angle of each
   character.

 * Arbitrarily x-, y-size.

 * Disk based. (The fonts are stored as IFF-files).

 * Backward compatible, i.e. Vector->Bitmap conversion
   exists.

 * Fast. Max: Same speed as ordinarily bitmap fonts.

 * Nice interlaced WYSIWYG editor with 3d-look.

Half finished properties:

 * Multicolor.

 * 3D-rendering. (Specify an observation point and you get
   the text rendered with that perspective.)

I plan to release this as some kind of PD in a near future,
but first I have to track down some bugs. This is why I
wrote this message to you all in the first place:

IS THERE ANYBODY WHO MIGHT CONSIDER TESTING MY PROGRAMS?

What I would like is to have the amiga library and the
editor tested, so please contact me if you have programming
experience (graphics.library, diskfont.library experience)
or have experience with wysiwyg editors and is interested in
hunting bugs. You need a machine with at least 1Meg to run
the editor. I would appreciate if someone with a PAL machine
would contacted me, because I have only tried the editor on
NTSC machines so far. Send a personal reply with some
information on your machine, your programming experiences
and possible what you want to use the fonts for (project?)
if you are interested.

I know that there exist other outline fonts (ACG!? Outline
fonts for Mac!?) It would be nice if I could make my fonts
compatible with those. Please let me know if you can give me
exact information on storage format or implementation of
those fonts.



Regards.
Michael Jansson.

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