Re: Using the FreeType 2.0 Polygon Rasterizer in a GraphicsPackage

[Dave Williss]

It's also useful for other special effects not related to boldifying text.
For example,
doing special gradient fills or filling with some pattern. These are
artistic things not
directly related to typography, but to do them requires the outline of the
font as a
series of points (I.e. with the curves interpolated already for the size
needed)


> >[ embolding ]
> >>I know, but many people ask this feature to deal with the case where the
> >>bold style of the font isn't available on the system..
> >[ ... ]
> >>I would agree, but you will always find people asking for it :-)
> >
> >And in my not-so-humble opinion you shouldn't always give people what
they
> >want, it's for their own good ;-)
>
> Don't forget: this feature may also be useful for other purposes...
> I could think of overlaying a stroked outline with a simple filled glyph
(or
> vice versa). In this case there would be (little) "embolding" too, but the
> line around the glyph would be of fixed width. (If you overlay a glyph
image
> with a slightly smaller one, the width of the line would not be fixed
> (indeed, it could partly disappear!), and you would have to mess with the
> coordinates of the two glyphs, and its sizes.)
> But for this to look esthetically, stroking with a stroke width greater
than
> 1 pixel would have to join the miters of the strokes according to the type
> of the point of the outline... this one seems to be non-trivial.
>
> Friedrich
>