Digital Punch Cutting

Digital punch cutting is today’s font technology. There are three different methods available for getting alphabets into digital form : hand-digitizing, auto-tracing and direct design on a workstation screen. The advent of intelligent font scaling requires us to ensure the ‘optical’ quality of a font and also the ‘numerical’ quality of its data; this, in turn, means that new procedures have to be added to the font production process. Furthermore, a given typeface has to be rendered on a wide variety of output devices ranging from computer displays, printers (dot-matrix, laser, inkjet or thermal-transfer) and typesetters (CRT or laser) to the more exotic devices such as plotters, vinyl-cutters and routers. To deal with this it is necessary to set up a database of font data, in a machine-independent format such as IKARUS. This enables us to cope with the long life cycles of typefaces and also to serve present and future applications by converting the IKARUS data into various machine-specific formats.