Rendering high-quality PK bitmap font in Linux environment

초록

METAFONT is a parameterized font that can generate different font styles by changing its parameters. It generates bitmaps fonts (Generic Font and TeX Font Metric) that are commonly used in TeX-based environment. The bitmap fonts generated from METAFONT can be utilized in devices of any size or resolution without creating a new font file for each. However, these fonts cannot be used outside the TeX environment. In our previous work, we proposed a module that supports METAFONT, GF, and PK fonts inside a Linux environment. The tracing approach we used in our previous work had some shortfalls. First, the module that converts glyph data into vector information requires much memory for individual glyph conversion, which downgrades the performance of the whole process. Secondly, our previous work is mainly compatible with high-resolution fonts; therefore, when a low-resolution font is rendered based on our previous work, it often generates blurry and broken output. To overcome this performance and quality issue of our previous work, we propose a module with a new tracing approach that not only improves the performance of our previous method but can generate high-quality output for both high and low resolutions inputs. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the dominance of our new proposed approach.

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