COHERENT PROCESSING OF CHARACTER SKELETAL FORMS

It is well known that in the general context the similarity relation i s very fuzzy and hard to define. Unfortunately, the intuitive notion o f similarity is not a transitive relation: knowing that A is similar t o B and that B is similar to C does not necessarily imply similarity b etween A and C. This is a main obstacle when trying to express formall y what a coherent font design is. In this paper we suggest a method to decompose complex letter forms into simpler elements and we suggest a formal transitive definition of a similarity relation between these e lements. In the context of digital typography, this definition enables developing an algorithm to recover classes of similar elements within different characters of a given font. This knowledge is further explo ited to ensure coherent type processing. For example, a modification ( e.g. by a type designer) of a character element is propagated automati cally to all the other characters that include a similar element. For the moment, the discussion is limited to the class of stroke fonts. (C ) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.