Only if he has a stroke on the type already and has outlined paths.

That’s what I keep insisting but he’s unrelentless… ?????

peace

Tell him that the pipe with the wacky tabaccey isn’t for work. :^P

There are old-school “plotter fonts” and metafonts as well as new fangled memory-saving stick fonts and stroke fonts out there. But ask “your friend” to name the typeface - my guess is he’s smoking (and not sharing).

Si

It must be very good - I better get over there right away…

peace

We all have “friends” with font issues - just part of the job.

isn’t this how the defunct type 3 postscript fonts worked?

Paul, no. What T3 allowed was for the outlines (just to be
clear: the black/white borders) to be stroked. Hmmm, but
did it also allow non-closed outlines? If so, then: Paul, yes.

hhp

If I remember correctly, Type 3 allowed practically any PostScript function to be used, including strokes, grayscale, conditional statements—anything pretty much. This is how random fonts like Beowolf were possible. It was also used for clip art fonts with complex images. The downside: no hints, so if all you wanted to do was to make a normal font, it looked like crap on a 300 dpi laser printer.

I do recall a company selling Type 3 fonts based on strokes. The advantage they touted was that you could squeeze or stretch the fonts without the kind of distortions you would get with outline fonts. Unfortunately, since the fonts were composed of unvarying strokes, the designs were limited and lacked optical corrections.

I also seem to recall that the original version of Courier that was built into the original LaserWriter was stroke-based.

If I can add a small comment.

Type 1 fonts permit stroke-based outlines. Most of
the type 1 fonts have a PaintType defined to be 0,
but if you set it to be 1, and define StrokeWidth to be
the pen thickness (30 is thin, 100 is thick), then
outlines are stroked. This can be used to thicken
fonts (not recommended though!), but it can also be used
to render fonts as strokes only.

The change in the PaintType value and the addition of StrokeWidth
parameter can be done in a standard text editor on the “pfa” version
of a type 1 font.

If this sounds too technical, I apologize. I will try
better next time.

Luc

Thanks for the info guys. I was unimagineable for me what my friend was telling me. He told me he had to outline the strokes of the font, which was simply a unclosed path when looked at in Illustrator outline view.
Now instead of thinkng he’s crazy (or being jealous of his enhanced perception), I feel sorry for him that he had to deal with it. Fonts from the Stoned Age…

peace