Structure Extraction and Automatic Hinting of Chinese Outline Characters

In spite of a worldwide trend towards the use of outline fonts for displays and for printing devices, they are still not very common in the east Asian countries where Chinese characters are used. The reason for this is that the complex, structured shapes of Chinese characters take a long time to design and develop. Several systems have proposed automatic generation of outline fonts from the original master fonts. These systems have the serious problem of quality degradation when rasterizing the font at small point sizes, because they do not incorporate a hinting mechanism to adjust the outlines under these circumstances. In this paper, we present an experimental study on a hinting mechanism specially designed for Chinese-style characters. We propose a scheme which automatically generates the hinted outline data from the plain outline fonts. We have implemented and experimented with four sets of Korean Myungjo (Ming) and Gothic style fonts, and have obtained good results with respect to font quality and development time.