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Inter-Office Memorandum To Spline Aficionados Date November 20, 1973 From Ad rienne Payne Location Palo Alto Subject Spline Function Representation Organization PARC/CSt of Chinese Characters XEROX Attached is a working draft of a paper by Bob Flegal; Bob .told me to tell you all that held be around to talk to you individually about the paper. Or, you can stop by the Graphics Lab and chat,with him. Distribution Patrick Baudelaire Danny Bobrow Alan Kay But 1er Lampson Dick Shoup Bob Sproull Bob Taylor Adele Goldberg Diana Jones (archive files) Dan Swi nehart David Liddle SPLINE FUNCTION REPRESENTATION OF CHINESE CHARACTERS Working Draft / August 15, 1973 Robert Flegal INTRODUCTION In using computers to represent and manipulate Chinese characters, much effort to date has quite properly been devoted to the primary problems of compactness of coding, storage and retrieval, and character- recognition [References I through 5]. Aesthetic problems in matters of typography and call igraphy have necessari ly played a lesser role. Yet looking ahead to the time when the aesthetic quality of computer generated output may be allowed to assume a greater significance, it is clear that much work remains to be done. Our purpose in this paper is to call attention to the possibilities inherent in the use of spline functions to represent arbitrary graphical figures In general, and Chinese characters in particular. Although t'he techniques have quite wide appl icabtl ity, we have chosen to illustrate their use in the treatment of hand-written characters input to a small computer system in real time. Cubic spline functions have properties that make them particularly suitable for approximating hand-drawn curves for which relatively few sample points are available. Most importantly they are the mathematical analog of splines used by draftsmen. A mechanical spline is a thin strip Robert Flegal I Working Draft I August 15, 1973 I Page 2 SPLINE FUNCTION REPRESENTATION OF CHINESE CHARACTERS of plastic or metal that can be constrained to a particular shape wi,th lead weights (called "dogs") that hold the strip In place. As a consequence of behaving like mechanical splines, cubic spline functions are smooth, and furthermore, a change In the position of one of the dogs do