[Image-SIG] Re: Hard to OCR Font

[Marilyn Davis]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Thomas A. Fine wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I was googling on font info, and came across your recent reference
> to myself, in Image-SIG.
> 
> I can't answer questions related to the software you are using.
> However, I wanted to comment on the font.  I've just finished
> a new version of my cursive font.  It has three sets of lower
> case letters, with no lead-ins, high-attaching lead-ins, and
> low-attaching lead-ins.  A script can convert text such that it
> will have the proper attachments.  This makes it both more readable
> and harder to OCR.  I provide a sample script on the web page
> (it's perl; I'm not looking for a perl/python flamefest; perl is
> just what I know).
> 
> In addition, my shadow fonts would also be hard to OCR, although
> I think they're also harder to read :).  I'm actually replacing
> my mailtos with links to a CGI that displays a gif image of the
> email address; and I started with the shadow font, then switched
> to the cursive.
> 
> If you want to forward any of this info that mailing list, that's
> fine with me.
> 
> http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/x11fonts.html
> 
> 	  tom
> 

-- 

Hi Tom,

(My sympathies about perl.)

You are so nice to write me.  I love your ttf fonts and your web page.
It's about the grooviest web site I've ever seen.

And, in fact, it was your cursive.bdf from your X11fonts page that
broke one PIL function, and your toast.ttf that broke the other.

I did load your dnahand.ttf font into PIL on a Windows machine last
night and it went in without a snag.  This has given me the confidence
to maybe look at the PIL code so I can get all your cool ttf fonts
happening on my linux box, and help PIL.

But Fredrik Lundh just pointed me to some .pil fonts so I might get
lazy and use them and move on.

I'm going away to Mexico tonight so I will stop thinking about this
for a few days.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to write.

Marilyn Davis