A Hybrid Approach to Rendering Handwritten Characters

Sara L. Su	Chenyu Wu	Ying-Qing Xu	Heung-Yeung Shum
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Carnegie Mellon University	Microsoft Research Asia	Microsoft Research Asia
In Proceedings of WSCG 2004

ABSTRACT

With the growing popularity of pen-based computers comes the need to display clear handwritten characters at small sizes on low-resolution displays. This paper describes a method for automatically constructing hinted TrueType fonts from on-line handwriting data. Hints add extra information to glyph outlines in the form of imperative constraints overriding side effects of the rasterization process. We use an aggressive matching strategy to find correspondences between an input glyph and a previously-hinted template, considering both global and local features to allow hinting even when they differ in shape and topology. Recognizing that stroke width statistics are among features that characterize a person's handwriting, we recalculate global values in the control value table (CVT) before transfer to preserve the characteristics of the original handwriting.

FILES

Sara L. Su, Chenyu Wu, Ying-Qing Xu, and Heung-Yeung Shum. A Hybrid Approach to Rendering Handwritten Characters. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG '04), Plzeň, Czech Republic, February 2004.

WSCG Paper: PDF (280 KB, 8 pages)
LCS Abstract: PDF (90 KB, 2 pages)

@inproceedings{Su:04:Handwriting,
  author = "Sara L. Su and Chenyu Wu and Ying-Qing Xu and Heung-Yeung Shum",
  title = "A Hybrid Approach to Rendering Handwritten Characters",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th International Conference in Central Europe on
              Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG '04)",
  location = "Plze\v{n}, Czech Republic",
  month = "January",
  year = "2004",
}

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was initiated while S. Su and C. Wu were interns at Microsoft Research Asia, and we acknowledge our colleagues there, at the Microsoft Redmond campus, and in the MIT Computer Graphics Group for insightful discussions about this work. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.