Kalamos is a reed pen simulator. The pen is a nib — a straight edge of a
given width held at a given angle — and the stroke is the area that edge
sweeps as it travels. On a touch screen the two corners of the nib are your two
fingers, so the width and the angle change as you write, exactly as they do with
a cut reed. With one finger, or a mouse, the nib takes the width and angle set by
the sliders.
Ink traces a hairline between the two nib
corners on every frame, leaving the hatched record of the pen's movement.
Vector fits a bezier curve to each edge of
the stroke when you lift, giving an outline you can edit: drag its nodes and
handles, or pick whole forms up with the move tool.
Outlines follow the conventions of type design — a node at every horizontal
and vertical extreme with its handles straight, no more nodes than the curve
needs, handles kept inside the tangent triangle, and black contours running
counterclockwise — so what you export can go straight into a font editor.
Where a stroke crosses itself the outline stays whole and the overlap stays
filled.
It was developed by Sina Fakour,
at the Arabic Type Unit (ATU)
of the American University of Beirut.
Kalamos, from the Greek kálamos, the reed. Interface set in Roboto.