Typography
Most fonts are represented these days digitally, as collections of
spline curves, together with extra information representing kerning
(intercharacter spacing) and "hints" for low-resolution rasterization.
Although there does not seem to be a direct connection with the
computational geometry community, there are a number of problems that
could be addressed here: how to automatically choose spline curves to
match a given drawing, how to kern and hint automatically or
semi-automatically instead of by eye, and how to use geometric font
characteristics to perform intelligent font substitution. There
are also interesting
computational issues connected with text layout (e.g. Knuth's line
breaking algorithm in TeX) but these seem less geometrical.
Part of
Geometry in Action,
a collection of applications of computational geometry.
David Eppstein,
Theory Group,
ICS,
UC Irvine.
Semi-automatically
filtered
from a common source file.
