DaType: A Stroke-Based Typeface Design System

Hitherto, computer-aided typeface design systems are not very popular in the designer community. A major reason for this is the inappropriateness of todays systems regarding the underlying design metaphors. On the one hand, those systems are too technically oriented to meet the view of the typographer. On the other, most systems are driven by the outline-paradigm historically introduced when digitizing hand-drawn letterforms. Shapes resulting from outline manipulation are not as predictable as shapes directly drawn by hand. Therefore, they are less intuitive in comparison with traditional design techniques. DaType is a stroke-based typeface design system providing design metaphors which are close to traditional design methods. Due to a constraint mechanism, style attributes shared by different letterforms are kept consistent. An object-oriented inheritance mechanism allows for hierarchical letterform composition, while propagating changes in style through the hierarchy. Also, the use of abstract quantities rather than numeric values, like coordinates, meet the traditional perspective of view.