It is a worldwide trend to represent a character with outline description. As a kind of outline font, the TrueType font have many advantages, i.e. WYSIWYG, printer portability, document portability and hinting program in a font file etc. But, it is time-consuming to generate characters from TrueType font data. Especially, the time for hinting is dominant in small characters(10-24 point) that are usually used in documents.
In this thesis, we design a hardware rasterizer for a TrueType font that consists of a hinting hardware and a character bitmap generating hardware. For obtaining analysis data, we implement a software rasterizer for the TrueType font. According to the analysis data, we design a hinting hardware with multi-moduled stack and pipeline for outline data operation.
The proposed hardware rasterizer for the TrueType font is compared with a software rasterizer executed on Intel 486-processor. The functionality of the designed hardware is verified by simulation. The performance evaluated on the simulator confirms that the haraware rasterizer for the TrueType font can be used for high performance raster image processing.
