page_title: Computer font
section_title: Stroke-based fonts
hierarchical_section_title: Computer font / Font types / Stroke-based fonts
caption_attribution_description: Svenska: Med Metafont går det att välja olika pennor för att producera olika former med samma penseldrag.
context_page_description: A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of movable metal type pieces in one style and size, since the 1990s it is generally used to refer to a set of digital shapes in a single style, scalable to different sizes. A font family or typeface refers to the collection of related fonts across styles and sizes.
  There are three basic kinds of computer font file data formats:
  Bitmap fonts consist of a matrix of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size.
  Vector fonts use Bézier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulae to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.
  Stroke fonts use a series of specified lines and additional information to define the profile, or size and shape of the line in a specific face, which together describe the appearance of the glyph.
  Bitmap fonts are faster and easier to use in computer code, but non-scalable, requiring a separate font for each size.
context_section_description: A glyph's outline is defined by the vertices of individual stroke paths, and the corresponding stroke profiles. The stroke paths are a kind of topological skeleton of the glyph. The advantages of stroke-based fonts over outline fonts include reducing number of vertices needed to define a glyph, allowing the same vertices to be used to generate a font with a different weight, glyph width, or serifs using different stroke rules, and the associated size savings. For a font developer, editing a glyph by stroke is easier and less prone to error than editing outlines.  A stroke-based system also allows scaling glyphs in height or width without altering stroke thickness of the base glyphs. Stroke-based fonts are heavily marketed for East Asian markets for use on embedded devices, but the technology is not limited to ideograms.
  Commercial developers included Agfa Monotype (iType), Type Solutions, Inc. (owned by Bitstream Inc.) (Font Fusion (FFS), btX2), Fontworks (Gaiji Master), which have independently developed stroke-based font types and font engines.
  Although Monotype and Bitstream have claimed tremendous space saving using stroke-based fonts on East Asian character sets, most of the space saving comes from building composite glyphs, which is part of the TrueType specification and does not require a stroke-based approach.
caption: With stroke-based fonts, the same stroke paths can be filled with different stroke profiles resulting in different visual shapes without the need to specify the vertex positions of each outline, as is the case with outline fonts.
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