On the performance of Decapod's digital font reconstruction

This paper presents the current status of Decapod's English font reconstruction. The Potrace algorithm and its parameters that affect glyph shape are examined. The visual fidelity of Decapod's font reconstruction is shown and compared to Adobe ClearScanTM. The font reconstruction details of the two methods are presented. The experiment demonstrates the capabilities of the two methods in reconstructing the font for a synthetic book typeset each time with one of six English fonts, three serif and three sans-serif. For both typefaces, Decapod is able to create a reusable TTF font that is embedded in the generated PDF document.