Method and apparatus for typographic glyph construction including a glyph server

• US 5,926,189 A
• Filed: 03/29/1996
• Issued: 07/20/1999
• Est. Priority Date: 03/29/1996
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Original Assignee: Apple Computer Incorporated (Apple Inc.)
• Inventors: Becker, Richard W., Opstad, David G., Beaman, Alexander B., Reed, Michael R.
• Primary Examiner(s): FETTING, ANTON W
• Application Number:
  US08/630,864
• Time in Patent Office: 1,208 Days
• Field of Search: 395/114, 395/167-171, 345/141-144, 345/467-470
• US Class Current: 345/467
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/109 Font handling; Temporal or kinetic typography
• CPC Class Codes: G06T 11/203 Drawing of straight lines or curves

Abstract

A system for typographic glyph construction includes a graphics system, a glyph server coupled to the graphics system, and an operating system coupled to the glyph server. An apparatus for typographic glyph construction of input text in a graphics system running on a computer system and output on an output device of the computer system includes a line layout core unit, a glyph cache unit coupled to the line layout core unit, an open font architecture services unit coupled to the glyph cache unit, at least one scaler unit coupled to the open font architecture unit, a font object management unit coupled to the at least one font scaler, and an attribute group support unit supporting a data structure for communication among the units of the apparatus. A method for processing input text in a graphics system running on a computer system and displaying typographic glyphs on a display device of the computer system includes mapping the input text into glyph codes, forming an initial glyph record array, the initial glyph record array comprising a plurality of glyph records for the glyph codes, processing a layout of the glyph codes to produce an updated glyph record array, rendering the updated glyph record array to produce a final glyph record array, and rendering a display of the typographic glyph output from the final glyph record array.

Claims

1. An apparatus for typographic glyph construction of a line of text in a graphics system operating in a computer system, the apparatus comprising:

a line layout core unit receiving glyph codes from the graphics system, determining glyph data descriptions and providing the line layout based text ordering which is also context and language dependent;

a glyph cache unit coupled to the line layout core unit for receiving the glyph data descriptions and determining if glyph data is in the glyph cache unit;

an open font architecture services unit coupled to the glyph cache unit for permitting support of multiple font file formats;

at least one scaler unit coupled to the open font architecture unit for receiving requests from the open font architecture unit and interpreting font data within a font file including providing a moniker attached to the font data to accelerate processing and providing font data length information;

a font object management unit coupled to the at least one font scaler and handling requests for the font data; and

an attribute group support unit supporting a data structure for communication among the line layout core unit, the glyph cache unit, the open font architecture services unit, the font scaler unit, and the font object management unit.

2. The apparatus of claim 1 wherein the line layout core unit further processes a layout of the glyph codes to produce a glyph record array.

3. The apparatus of claim 2 wherein the line layout core unit processes the layout for positional and non-positional adjustments.

4. The apparatus of claim 2 wherein the glyph cache unit provides metrics and renderings to update the glyph code array.

5. The apparatus of claim 4 wherein the open font architecture services unit further updates the glyph code array with pointers to the glyph renderings.