The invention describes a method for reconstructing characters in a document, which are expressed in one or more fonts, to convert the characters to a different font designed to closely match characters from a plurality of fonts in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This is accomplished by first selecting a first character from the document and thereafter substituting for the first character the same character constructed from the different font and having the same width as the first character, the characters of varying widths within the different font being designed to have aesthetically pleasing relationships between their parts irrespective of width. The construction and substitution of characters of the different font for each of the characters in said document needing reconstruction is continued in the same manner until all the characters in the document needing reconstruction have been substituted, thereby creating a reconstructed document having an aesthetically pleasing relationship among the characters in the document. Thereafter the reconstructed document is stored, printed or displayed.
In a text display system facilitating the editing of text, smooth and flicker free updates to text displayed using proportionally spaced fonts are effected by interleaving the characters of an original and an updated text according to their associated cumulative character widths by sequentially storing each lesser cumulative character width and each character in buffers thereby establishing the order of display of the interleaved characters according to each original and updated cumulative character widths. The interleaved characters are then displayed according to the order of storage thereby incrementally displaying and deleting characters of the updated and original texts respectively such that an original character is deleted and replaced by an appropriate number of updated text characters resulting in a smooth text update.
Two types of outline font data defining thin and thick line characters belonging to the same font category are stored in a character ROM. Intermediate line characters of the same font category are generated based on the data stored in the character ROM without need for fixedly determining an order of arrangement of a plurality of pieces of data making up the character.
A method of displaying predefined characters contained in a font which maintain their artistically pleasing shapes as font design properties change over a font design axis (which defines a variable font design property) including the steps of: (1) including within each character definition a character-specific transition point which will be used to select a predefined character attribute of the character when it is displayed, the transition point lying along the font design axis; (2) selecting a value for the variable font design property of the character along the font design axis, and then determining a predefined character attribute for the character based upon the location of the selected value in relation to the character-specific transition point along the font design axis; and (3) displaying the character using the selected value of the variable font design property and the determined, predefined character attribute.
A method and apparatus for reconstructing legible characters from stored data are described. For each of a plurality of handwritten strokes, a set of endpoint conditions is received. The endpoint conditions are data which define an initial and a final tangent angle for the stroke, and positions of an initial and a final endpoint of the stroke. For each set of endpoint conditions, an artificial stroke is constructed such that it satisfies the corresponding endpoint conditions and consists of at most three segments. Each of these segments consists of a straight line or an arc. Within any given stroke, lines and arcs may occur only in alternation.
A computer system for rendering text is provided. A keyboard is used to enter characters into the computer system. A character code corresponding to each entered character is generated. A particular font is chosen from a font table stored in memory. The font table contains a number of different fonts, with each font having a number of glyph indexes corresponding to a number of different glyphs. A character can have a plurality of different glyph indexes for a particular font. A processor maps the character code to a glyph index according to the selected font and later processes the glyph index. The glyph corresponding to the processed glyph index is then displayed.
