Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 11:34:11PM +1000, Erik wrote:
This looks like a cool and powerful tool for type. It is open source. It works with Linux, Mac and Win. Is it relevant to Inkscape?
http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/
Erik
Hi Erik,
Thanks for the link. This looks to be a Flash interface for improving typography of HTML by using the Flash engine. Cool idea, but fairly orthogonal to what we're doing. However, someone might find it interesting to study, it looks like kind of a fresh idea...
One idea this gives is some sort of tool to do SVG layout based on an HTML page... Be a cool idea, but probably be pretty challenging, esp. if CSS is involved...
For my Master's thesis, way back in 1991 (eek!), I put together a 3D-text object package. First, I took Bitstream outline data and extruded it into polyhedra. These worked in the 3D environment built by the Brown University Graphics Group. I had read the five volumes of Knuth's Computers & Typesetting, so I knew that I didn't want to build my own text layout engine too. Instead, I hacked dvips to generate output in the format that I needed, generated appropriate font metric data, and wrote some LaTeX macros. Voila, high-quality typography with a fraction of the effort.
Probably not the right way to go now, though.