Editing Computer font (section)

=== Stroke-based fonts ===
[[File:Metafont pens.png|thumb|With stroke-based fonts, the same stroke paths can be filled with different stroke profiles resulting in different visual shapes without the need to specify the vertex positions of each outline, as is the case with outline fonts.]]

A glyph's outline is defined by the vertices of individual stroke paths, and the corresponding stroke profiles. The stroke paths are a kind of [[topological skeleton]] of the glyph. The advantages of stroke-based fonts over outline fonts include reducing the number of vertices needed to define a glyph, allowing the same vertices to be used to generate a font with a different weight, glyph width, or serifs using different stroke rules, and the associated size savings. For a font developer, editing a glyph by stroke is easier and less prone to error than editing outlines.  A stroke-based system also allows scaling glyphs in height or width without altering stroke thickness of the base glyphs. Stroke-based fonts are heavily marketed for East Asian markets for use on embedded devices, but the technology is not limited to [[ideogram]]s.

Commercial developers include [[Agfa Monotype]] ({{Proper name|iType}}) and Type Solutions, Inc. (owned by [[Bitstream Inc.]]) have independently developed stroke-based font types and font engines.

Although Monotype and Bitstream have claimed tremendous space saving using stroke-based fonts on East Asian character sets, most of the space saving comes from building composite glyphs, which is part of the TrueType specification and does not require a stroke-based approach.