[Verse-dev] Verse in Cairo?

[jonathan ferguson]

hi.

On Oct 6, 2008, at 6:51 AM, Emil Brink wrote:

> The problem then, I guess, becomes "is it possible to go from whatever
> representation you want to edit fonts in, to Verse's
> subdivision surfaces for publishing to Verse, and back again in a
> loss-less non-ambigous manner?". Unfortunately, I don't
> know the answer to that question. :)

Well, to start to answer that question, the following documentation  
might be useful:

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/overview.html#intro

Note that there are several classes of "curves" supported by  
FontForge: cubic, quadratic and something called clothoid splines. A  
library is available to convert clothoid splines to bezier curves.  
Blender has support for bezier curves. Most animation curves are  
likely to fall into this category, because animations usually ease-in  
and ease-out, which is a convenient property of Bezier type curves.

See: http://libspiro.sourceforge.net/

There are numerous approaches to converting between cubic, and  
quadratic curves with various successes. The main area of this work  
occurs in font design unsurprisingly, where designers are exposed to  
the actual curves themselves. As a consequence it might be  
illustrative to look into the systems designed to convert or create  
libre fonts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAFONT
http://www.typophile.com/node/8194
and to one article linked at the end of the Typophile page:
http://www.ntg.nl/maps/26/15.pdf

The question still remains, however, and I don't know the answer, but  
perhaps the creator of libsprio, Raph Levien http://www.levien.com/  
and more currently http://www.advogato.org/person/raph/ would know.  
For a hint of this, read the aforementioned page and http://levien.com/phd/elastica_hist.pdf

It is definitely worth asking. Having a network transparent layer for  
Cairo enabled apps could indeed be useful. "Cairo" as a renderer might  
not be the logical place for it though--- would lib2geom be better?

have a day.yad
jdpf