ORIENTAL CHARACTER FONT DESIGN BY A STRUCTURED COMPOSITION OF STROKE ELEMENTS

Oriental characters (such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters) are composed of several strokes, and the shape of each stroke is determined by a brush sweep. In the paper, a new representation scheme is proposed for the design of stroke-structured fonts. This approach (called a structured composition of stroke elements) reflects the characteristics of oriental characters; each character is constructed as a set of strokes, and each stroke is represented by primitive features called stroke elements. Since the construction of an exact brush sweep is computationally quite expensive, we suggest a simple approximation method. The outlines of stroke pens are used to represent the starting, ending, and bending of a stroke. The positions of seed pens are interpolated to generate the skeleton curve of a stroke trajectory. The outline of each stroke is generated automatically from the stroke elements. The boundary of each character is constructed by merging these stroke outlines. This approach has various advantages: the font design becomes much simpler, the necessary storage space is greatly reduced, and the font variation becomes much more flexible.