Analysing Character Shapes by String Matching Techniques

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 characters, designers implicitly state their design intentions through the resulting character shapes. The font industrialization process which follows is aimed at bringing the characters into a form suitable for rendering the shape of the characters on computer-driven typesetters and page printers [2]. The process may involve some uniformizationand regularization of the original shapes, thus contradicting the designer’s original intention. Once the character shapes have become computer objects, they are subjected to rendering rules programmed by computer scientists in order to produce fonts of industrial quality on a variety of devices (displays, page printers, typesetters). But since the intentions of the original designer are lacking, programs responsible for producing the characters can only