Variable Width Splines: a Possible Font Representation?

Many fonts derive from stroke-based ancestry. Pressure applied to the pen or brush provided some variation in the stroke width, which defined a region on each side of a centreline. A simple representation of fonts as variable width strokes is presented in this paper. Advantages include a good first step toward typographic scaling (stroke width scales independently of overall scale factor), and preservation of topology at low resolutions (minimum stroke width can be enforced). A chief disadvantage is the lack of experience designing fonts in this paradigm, or building routines to convert from other paradigms.