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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Software developer and former computer science student Amit Patel has written a post about generating curved text [redblobgames.com] for maps and other purposes.

Over the last few posts I wrote about things I did to improve font quality, such as antialiasing [redblobgames.com] and combining distance fields [redblobgames.com] to merge outlines and halos. But I want to “pop up the stack” a bit and talk about one of the bigger goals for this project. I want to render text in styles that I’ve seen in maps, both online and offline, both fantasy and real. In particular, I want to apply spacing, rotation, and curvature to the labels.

[...] These are common in cartography, not only in fantasy maps like Tolkein’s but also in real-world maps. Eduard Imhof’s classic 1975 paper, Positioning Names on Maps [archive.org]^[1] has a ton of great advice on how to position labels, and not only recommends curving text, but also sketches out examples:

In some ways, that desktop computing has moved beyond monospace type comes down to the long term impact of a course in calligraphy and typography [medium.com] which took place decades ago. Now even your GUIs on GNU/Linux or the BSDs provide a variety of typefaces — in straight lines. Text along curved paths is another step forward.

Previously:
(2020) Fonts for Programmers and Developers [soylentnews.org]

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