More on Autotracing

I've been doing some more experiments with auto-tracing. The challenge is to make the curves look good even when the type is scaled up. Sad experience shows that no matter how much you might want people to use your fonts at the sizes they were designed for, you will always see them as tall as you are on the side of a bus. (Note: I am working on a version of Dear Sarah that scales a little better)

This sample was created with the open source utility autotrace, which is a pretty cool little tool. I took the reference image from yesterday's post and upsampled it by about three times. This has the effect of blurring the image. When I then put a threshold on the image, the edges are all a little rounder. No resolution is lost from the original image because the blurring comes from the upsample, but the resulting traces are rounder, and work better when scaled.

Unfortunately most autotrace algorithms are trained to recognize shapes and make nice circles and squares out of things. In this case, we want to preserve the organic quality of the source, so lumpy curves are better than perfect circles. The trick is to make lumpy curves that look nice when scaled. Screwy bezier curves that look like they've had their control points randomized always look bad (sorry Beowolf).