Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: TeX fonts by FTP
Message-ID: <9570@sol.ARPA>
Date: 10 May 88 20:15:56 GMT
References: <10704@sunybcs.UUCP> <4060001@hpmtlx.HP.COM>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 24

|I have heard (read) somewhere of someone developing a system to produce
|caligraphic text by making ``human-like'' variations in the letter
|formations.  Without that, anything you produce comes out looking too
|mechanical.  Seems like the only way to do it in TeX is to have some extra
|mapping of normal source letters onto several varying fonts, each giving
|slight variations.  It would be best to chose variations according to
|context (like glorified ligatures), and to have *lots* of variations.
|That's probably the only thing that would give suitable results.
|I haven't heard of anything like that for TeX!
|					Keith Blackwell	(hplabs!hpmtlkb!kwb)

I'm not sure what exactly you mean. If you mean introduce some
variations in the letter shapes at font construction time, see the
METAFONT book on adding randomness.

If you mean introduce different randomness in every piece of output,
then caligraphic fonts are more amenable than raster fonts to this kind
of bending. Otherwise you would have to store many variations. Good
application for CD ROMS?  I don't know what this buys you.  Junk
advertising would remain junky (in content).  Certainly it would break
the monotony of printed output.  But who needs computers?  People who
have tried to read my handwriting have no problems with monotony :-).

	Ken