Re: Italic open-o in omega

Ignoring (for the moment) whether inter-font kerning
can ever be needed, I begin to wonder whether the
font-metric/glyph dichotomy is just our current way
of representing what is, in fact, a continuum.  Is it
not possible that one representation of (glyphs in)
a font could be an iterated fractal ?  If we think of
fonts in this way, then a typesetting program could
load whatever degree of precision it needed for the task
in hand : for simple "rectangle" models of typesetting,
such as TeX, only the coarsest precision would be needed;
at a higher level of refinement (e.g., the skyline model)
more detail would be needed, and for the final typesetting
process, the rendering engine could request whatever degree
of precision would be needed to complement the resolution
of the typesetter itself.  But all of these could live in
a single iterated fractal representation, rather than 
requiring (at the very least) two distinct files, one
for metrics and one for outlines.  What do others think ?

Philip Taylor
--------
Vladimir Volovich wrote:
> 
> "WA" == William Adams writes:
> 
>  WA> Except that it's able to do this for arbitrary pairs (say between
>  WA> two totally different / unrelated fonts)
> 
> well, yes - if we talk about inter-font kerning (between unrelated
> fonts), then yes, it's hard to do this via the metric files, and it's
> simpler to generate the kerning on the fly (maybe, not necessarily
> using glyph shapes of the low-level font formats, but some kind of
> "considerably more powerful metric which could describe each glyphs
> outline" mentioned by Philip Taylor).
> 
> though, it's not clear whether such inter-font kerning is really
> useful - why would the single word consist of glyphs taken from
> unrelated fonts?