[Dev-luatex] Wishing is free: fonts and glyph placement

[Barry Schwartz]

Javier Múgica <javier at digi21.eu> skribis:
> While computing gliph spacing by analyzing the glyph's shapes may be
> too involved, a good, easier solution could be that, in addition to
> the rectangle enclosing the glyph, another shape were known, not so
> complicated as a glyph's shape but not so crude as a rectangle.

This is roughly what I do with my (unfortunately not documented)
"spacing by anchors" fontforge scripts at sortsmill.googlecode.com. I
say "roughly" because I use only a very limited number of manually
chosen horizontal cross-sections of a "virtual" surrounding shape, and
because the samples are not stored in the font (there being no
typesetting or word processing software that can use them) but used to
compute class-based kerning tables. Also I have made no attempt to
support mathematical typesetting. The idea, though, that typesetting
software could use such an approach to space glyphs rapidly, on the
fly, given the shape-approximations, has occurred to me.

(With fontforge one could look at the spacing point placements of my
fonts, for instance
http://code.google.com/p/sortsmill/source/browse/lindenhill/LindenHill.sfd
which I have been working on recently.)