TYPO Font Editing System
Technical Overview
User Interface
- Runs under the X window system
- Clearly organized display
- User guidance with messages
and permanent display of the present mouse button meanings
- Permanent display of important character properties:
- Character code
- Character name
- Font name
- Character width
- Zoom factor
- Scroll position
- Was the character modified after last being saved?
- Positioning with the mouse:
- unrestricted
- horizontal
- vertical
- Precise positioning with arrow keys
- User-definable function keys
- Option settings and function keys can be saved
in a global and in a local context to
create one's individual working environment,
and to change the environment for particular projects
- For each operation, TYPO displays
coordinates and relevant angles;
these values can either be changed graphically (for instance,
using dragging) or by entering numerical values
- Zooming and scrolling to view any subpart of a character
- A focus describes the interesting area of a
character
- Consistent mouse button usage through all functions
- A rich toolkit for selections, drawing, and painting:
- Select rectangle or lasso
- Select curve point or curve or whole contour
- Any combinations of such selections
- Select one or more guide lines or guide line overhangs
- Drag curve point, restrained or unrestrained
- Draw curve or spline
- Free hand painting (doing curve fitting for outline characters)
- Any menu command is assignable to function keys
- Undo and Redo
- Popup confirmers for critical operations
Fonts
- Raster and outline fonts with up to 32,768 characters each
- Multiple master fonts
- Raster character size up to 4000 by 4000
- Imports and exports:
- TYPO native format
- Adobe TYPE 1 and TYPE 3 outline fonts
(imports all of TYPE 1, but only a subset of the TYPE 3 format)
- PostScript raster fonts
- SUN F3 fonts
- BDF (X windows raster) fonts
- TeX fonts in GF, PK, and PXL formats
- FrameMaker bfont fonts
- Ikarus IK (outline) and SC (raster) fonts
- UNIX vfont files
- SUN rasterfile and icon files
- PCX image files for scanner support
- Imports:
- Fontographer packed PostScript fonts
- Exports:
- PostScript outline and raster encapsulated files
- Metafont font definitions
- Exports Metric Files:
- PostScript AFM
- TeX TFM and PL
- FrameMaker BFM
- Ikarus SP
- Documented internal ASCII font format
for customer-programmed import/export
- Supports scanned art by importing PCX and SUN rasterfile,
and the TYPO auto-trace feature
Font Management
- Simultaneous management of up to 4 fonts
- Font popup window:
- Font manipulation at-one-glance
- Copy single characters or character sequences, also between fonts
- Delete characters
- Highlight modified characters
- View and set font properties:
- Font short name and long name
- Font family name
- Font number
- Font version
- Font foundry
- Short and long copyright notice
- Creation and modification dates
- Font weight, width, and style
- Font point size and design size
- Base line overhang minimal point size
- Simultaneously change all characters in a font:
- Move base points
- Assign a fixed width
- Change widths
- Scale
- Rotate
- Slant
- Mirror
- Font kerning window:
- Allows the viewing and changing of all kerning
information in a font at one glance
- Predefined font encodings:
- Adobe StandardEncoding
- ISO Latin 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, special encoding
- F3 encoding
- Ikarus encoding
- Macintosh encoding
- Other font encodings can be user-defined
- Load a font read-only or read/write
- Browse through a font
- Checkpoint modified fonts and the current character upon
abnormal termination (such as the user exiting the window system).
Characters
- Outline and raster characters
- Two-level hierarchical definition of outline characters
allows consistent usage of serifs and alike, with exactly the same
shape appearing in all occurences
- Display of the current character at various zoom factors:
- Raster characters: magnification 1/64 to 64
(in multiples of 2)
- Curve characters: magnification 0.001 to 5
- A background character may be edited and viewed together
with the currently edited character:
- To review specific changes
- To compare visual appearance
- As a master for manual outline enhancements after automatic
tracing
- For cutting and pasting
- Assign a meaningful name to a character
- Locate character by key stroke, font position
(decimal, hexadecimal, or octal) or full name
- Save a character in any currently loaded and writeable font
Guide Lines
- Guide lines are defined per font, for all its characters
- Up to 10 vertical guide lines:
- Relative to base point for left bearings
- Up to 10 horizontal guide lines, for:
- Body height
- Ascender
- Cap height
- Digit height
- x height
- Underline position
- Descender
- Body depth
- User-definable
- Guide lines can be slanted by -45 to 45 degrees
for Italics and oblique characters
- Guide line visibility:
- Invisible
- Intersection points visible as bull's-eyes
- Visible dotted
- Visible solid
- Guide line functionality:
- Create, move, delete by dragging
- Name/Rename
- Change overhang alignment zone
- Change italics angle
Outline Characters
- Curve types:
- Bezier curves
- Circle arcs
- Lines
- Curve display:
- Curve points and tangents invisible
- Curve end points marked
- Curve points and control points marked
- Tangents shown
- Curve points marked and tangents shown
- Show nonsmooth curve points or show inflections
Raster and Outline Character Editing
- Freehand painting of pixels and lines
- Freehand painting of points and lines with a
user-defined pen
- Load pens from raster font
- Store pens in raster font
- Define elliptic or rectangular pen at any size or any angle
- Curve/curve point dragging:
- Unrestrained
- Preserving angles and smoothness
- Along incoming slope
- Along outgoing slope
- Perpendicular to slope
- Draw curves or splines
- Change curve properties
- Split a curve
- At the midpoint
- At minima and maxima
- At inflection points (where the curvature changes
from left to right, or from right to left)
- At a selected position
- Cut and paste selected parts of characters
- Set base point
- Set width
- Set kerning correction against another character
- Fill:
- Grey: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%
- User-specified pattern
- For raster characters: artificial horizontal and vertical
emboldening and thinning
- Outline-raster conversion, in both directions
- Insert text from a raster or outline font, e.g., to allow producing
logos:
- Scaled horizontally
- Scaled vertically
- Scaled uniformly in both directions (fixed ratio)
- Rotated
- Transformations applied to the whole character or to
some of its parts
- Translate (move around)
- Scale
- Rotate at any angle
- Skew (slant)
- Mirror
- Project (outlines only)
- Interpolate (outlines only)
Adjust Curve Characters
- Smoothen a curve with its neighbors
- Flatten a curve end, producing an optically pleasing
transition from straight lines to curves
- Enhance curve sequence appearances by
smoothing the curvature (spline-fitting):
- Unrestrained at the end points
- Given slopes at the end points
- Make a line or a curve tangent horizontal or vertical
- Make a line or a curve tangent parallel
to some other line or tangent
- Make a line or a curve tangent perpendicular
to some other line or tangent
- Align a point with (the continuation of) a given line or
tangent
Hints
Hints apply to outline characters only,
and govern the rasterization process.
- Stem hints enforce equal-width stems in outline characters,
at all point sizes
- Beam hints enforce equal-width beams in outline characters,
at all point sizes
- Hints are effective for TYPO
internal scan conversion, for
Adobe TYPE 1 and TYPE 3 fonts, as well as METAFONT fonts
- Hints handle character overhang alignment properly;
overhangs are suppressed at small sizes as determined by the user
- Hint functions:
- Create a stem/beam hint
- Bind a different point to a stem/beam hints
- Define a character overhang hint with respect to a guide line
- Define a character overhang hint with respect to another hint
- Delete a hint
- Make a curve rigid/flexible
Sub-Characters
- Define certain shapes common to several characters in an outline
font, as sub-characters (for example serifs or accents)
- Sub-characters are defined only once,
but can be referenced in arbitrarily
many characters within a font
- A change made to a sub-character is propagated to all the
referencing characters
- Sub-characters are edited like ordinary characters
Viewing Text
- The typeset window displays the current character in the
context of user-specified characters
- Particularly useful for:
- Overall appearance judgement
- Base point placement
- Character width determination
- Etc.
- Immediate reflection of character changes in the typeset
window
- Pixel magnification [1/64-64] and curve zooming [0.001-5]
Outline Font Paint Modes
- The paint mode is specified per font, and can be changed
for individual contours
- Paint mode override in individual characters/contours
allows to create complex logos
- Separate grey tones for filling and for the contour
- Paint modes:
- No fill
- Even-odd fill
- Wrap-count fill
- Stroke
- Even-odd fill/Stroke
- Wrap-count fill/Stroke
- Elliptic pen
- Rectangular pen
Import/Export
- Typo recognizes a multitude of font formats, via built-in conversion
programs, invoked at the time a font is loaded or saved
- Simple ASCII formats for the TYPO
internal font
files allow the customer to create individual import/export conversion
programs
- Scanner support via raster file formats such as PCX or
SUN rasterfile
and the TYPO auto-tracing feature
- Can be used with systems using PostScript,
because it generates standard AFM and font files
Architecture
- Works in the standard X (OpenWindows) window environment
- Runs on the SUN family of SPARCstations under the
SOLARIS operating system
- Uses ASCII files for storing TYPO
fonts
Adobe, FrameMaker, and PostScript are registered trademarks of
Adobe Systems, Inc.
SUN, SOLARIS, and SPARCStation are registered trademarks of
SUN Microsystems, Inc.
Fontographer is a trademark of Altsys Corp.
UNIX is a trademark of UNIX System Laboratories.
All other trademarks are either trademarks or registered trademarks of
their respective owners.
Specifications are subject to change without notice
(C) 2000 Typographics Ltd.