Analysing character shapes by string matching techniques
Jacky Herz, Roger D. Hersch · Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 1993
INTRODUCTION Characters are carefully designed shapes incorporating both the design ideas of a skilled character designer [1] and the rules related to visual appearance. The visual appearance of printed characters is the result of many interacting factors: the design intentions of the type designer, the artistic creation of the different character shapes as typeface masters, the font industrialization, rendering and printing processes and, last but not least, the way the characters are perceived by human beings (Figure 1). In the last decade, the font acquisition, industrialization and rendering processes have been computerized, without however significantly modifying the way in which characters are created. The majority of type designers still hide their design intentions within manual or computer-aided type creations generally represented by contours, and filled using either black ink or a computer. By presenting the result of the design process as large size master chara