Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method.
It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!
The initial input is high resolution images using a DSLR and a macro lens, or at least it will be soon. Initial testing of the method has been done using 200mp images taken casually with a standard modern cell phone.
The underlying new computational geometry method can be extended to 3d but that isn't necessary for this application unless we also extract a 3d image of the page itself. For now at least we are not doing that as it would be even more complicated and finicky. Possibly for soft enough pages the letterpress imprint will deform the page enough that the deformation can be detected and help figure out where the original metal pressed and where the ink is due to page bleed.
Essentially what we are doing is taking high resolution photos, using computational geometry methods on those to extract the shapes, and then refining those shapes through a mixture of automation and manual labor.
The entire thing is called "Donkey Free" and will have information online in the near future. I just bought the domain ( donkeyfree.com ) for this 2 days ago; this is all extremely new. I'd like to release the resulting fonts under a license allowing free use for many purposes but we still need to think through that to figure out how to make that sustainable.
It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!