One of my long term projects is the production
of interesting random fonts for the simulation
of handwriting or for that human touch that
is so necessary to bring the blackboard to the
transparency for presentations.
Eventually, I want to develop a complete mathematical
font collection that would make the math books look
like they were copied from the blackboard,
with total integration of text and picture.
Any prospective Ph.D. student interested in helping
me with this?
First we tried to make
random fonts by random convex combinations of
parent fonts, very much as multiple master fonts
interpolate between their "masters". This
research was reported in work with
Mike McDougall in
L. Devroye and M. McDougall,
Random fonts for the simulation of handwriting,
Electronic Publishing,
vol. 8,
pp. 281-294,
1995.
Mike, an undergraduate at McGill at the time,
was supported by an NSERC summer research award,
for which we are very thankful to the Canadian government.
The text below shows his font, Tekla, at work.
It is a random type 3 font, which for now is
only useful in PostScript files as we have no
metrics (AFM) files. The source code
is available. It has the font and shows at the end
how to use the font to generate the menu.
So, fine, you may not like Mike's handwriting, but
our objective was to show one possible route for development.
His font has a "craziness" parameter, by which we could actually
extrapolate beyond the convex polyhedron determined by
the master fonts. The effects are illustrated below.
Luc Devroye
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6
luc@cs.mcgill.ca
http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc