Paragon, an interactive, extensible, environment for typeface design

Typefaces have been designed and used for over 600 years. As new technology was developed, new methods were designed to cope with the changes in materials and techniques. The current century has seen the development of raster output devices in the form of laser printers, CRT typesetters, and bitmapped graphics displays. Systems used to generate digital type designs for these devices generally fall into the category of copying systems rather than design systems. Little work has been done to provide the type designer with a system intended to be used for the design of new typefaces.

This thesis discusses a typeface design system which has been created to fill this gap. The system, named Paragon, is an interactive, extensible, typeface design environment implemented on an interactive graphics workstation. It is an attempt to integrate the traditional typeface design environment with the capabilities of interactive computer graphics. It enhances the traditional environment by providing functions to aid the design process which are difficult to do by hand, but easy to do within a computer system. The design system itself is extensible in that a designer who has little if any knowledge of computers or programming can create new commands by using the primitive operations that are provided and can then incorporate these commands into the working environment.