Concise Letter/Type Font Description: Theory and Computer Implementation.

The wide variety of type fonts presently available makes it possible to express an equally wide variety of moods in printed material. With the introduction of computers into various aspects of the production and reading of printed material, it has become necessary to develop concise ways of handling this variability. This paper discusses an empirically based grammatical approach for the concise description of letters and type fonts. Starting with a skeleton, or basic form for each letter, a grammar is presented consisting of rules which add the appropriate embellishments to the skeleton resulting in any one of the many type fonts within a given class of fonts. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated by the implementation of a computer based type font storage system.