Fonts, vectors & headache

I'm developing new 3D text effects, so I need to handle font data and vector calculations. There are some kind of conventions about how font metadata must be, so I can generate my vector data more easily. What happens if people create fonts regardless those conventions? I can't get my vector based info quickly enough.

If you have some knowledge about vector based calculations, for sure you have already heard about "normal vectors". Possibly you have even made some calculations with them.

Well, they are really important for many 2D and mainly 3D graphic algorithms, so I deal with these kind of vectors daily. They are so important that usually we use some conventions to get them as easy and fast as possible. That's the point: they must be fast to calculate. Below you see an transparent wire-frame letter "a" in Arial font. The normal vectors of interest are drawn in gray too. I got all these normals easily because our good old Arial font was made correctly.


Unfortunately, there are many non-professional fonts that are not so good as the Arial one. This really bothers me, because I can not get the vector based data for these bad fonts as fast as I need to use in complex graphic effects. I have already added a lot of complexity to some of my algorithms just to be able to use these fonts.

If people followed techniques, conventions and standards when doing tech tasks (like fonts creation), software development would not be such a mess. :(

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