advice sought turning font outlines into renderable polygons i am seeking some alternate solutions on how to turn a postscript type or truetype font outline into polygons that can be subsequently scan converted by a d scanline renderer i have been studying the problem of font conversion for a few years but have never had the need to implement such a system well i now have the opportunity to write some font rendering software so i would like to have some of my questions answered before i jump into the deep end the main problem i face is how to use the even odd or non winding rules to turn the outlines into a single outline polygon my renderer can handle complex polygons so there is no need to reduce the polygons to simple polygons for example in the letter o there are two outlines the outside outline which is clockwise truetype font the inside outline which is counterclockwise one common solution used by a number of rendering packages is to simply connect the inner outline to the outer outline at the point where the two outlines are closest this is equivalent to descibing a polygon with holes the renderer will then make the appropriate hole since the interior polygon edges are in the opposite direction to the outside edges i do not want to use this simplistic system since it will not handle all outline fonts properly it is not a simple matter to connect the outer outline to the inner outline for some fancy fonts it does not properly handle the even odd or non winding rules from my research over the years the proper solution is to use a trapezoid decomposition algorithm to scan convert the outlines into trapezoids as is done by the postscript and truetype font rasterizers these trapezoidal polygons can then be easily and properly rendered by the d scanline renderer my question is are there any better solutions to turning the outlines into polgyons other than the trapezoid decomposer i am not fond of this solution since it creates excess number of polygons another question for those in the know what is the best algorithm to create bevelled and or offset curves for font outlines i have a dozen papers on these subjects but i can t tell which method is the best to implement thanks for any pointers rob lansdale robert lansdale dynamic graphics project internet lansd dgp toronto edu computer systems research institute uucp uunet dgp toronto edu lansd university of toronto bitnet lansd dgp utoronto toronto ontario m s a canada
