Support for third-order spline fonts

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jamadagni
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Support for third-order spline fonts

Post by jamadagni »

Well by the subject line I do also mean support for third-order spline fonts in FC. Any future plans for supporting them?

Apart from that, does anyone have any idea about the support for third-order spline fonts on various platforms/software?

Windows XP?
Windows 7?
Word 2003?
Word 2010?
Linux? (I presume yes, since FreeType supports 3rd order splines.)
LibreOffice?
Mac OS X?
Shriramana Sharma
William
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Re: Support for third-order spline fonts

Post by William »

Some years ago I wrote a web page about using Microsoft Paint to produce curves. The page includes producing curves that I now think are third-order Bézier curves.

I do not know whether knowing what is in that web page about using the curve tool in Microsoft Paint will be in any way helpful to what you are trying to do.

However, just in case it is, here is the link.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04000.htm

William Overington

7 July 2012
jamadagni
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Re: Support for third-order spline fonts

Post by jamadagni »

Hello William and thanks for your kind response. However the question was not about being able to draw third-order curves (which I can do using Inkscape on all the platforms that software runs on) but about the support for fonts using third-order splines in the font-rendering subsystem of various platforms.
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vanisaac
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Re: Support for third-order spline fonts

Post by vanisaac »

The true type standard defines glyph outlines by quadratic bezier splines and only quadratic splines. As a true type editor, cubic splines are not supported in FCP and could not be saved anyway. On the other hand, the post script font format defines glyph outlines by cubic bezier splines, so a tool that makes post script fonts would support cubic splines. SVG fonts can define both quadratic and cubic splines, as well as arcs, although very few features of true type and post script fonts are supported by the SVG standard.
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