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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!hogpc!houxe!drutx!druky!ewh
From: ewh@druky.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Hershey fonts
Message-ID: <758@druky.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Sep-84 12:17:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: druky.758
Posted: Wed Sep 12 12:17:22 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Sep-84 20:54:38 EDT
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver
Lines: 40

re: hershey fonts; in response to "colonel's" query, herewith my understanding
of their history.
	Mr. Hershey was an employee of the federal govt., either the Navy or
the Bureau of Standards; in the '60's, he took a number of commercial type
fponts and translated them (ugh! and whew!) into machine coded "strokes"
as if a draftsman were doing the lettering by hand.  If you have them around,
you can actually watch a plotter doing those strokes verbatim even today.
I don't know what machine they were originally designed for, but they are
fairly universal in a graphics sense.
	The Hershey fonts really came to light in the Unix world along with
the "pseudo-typsetting" packages first done at Toronto, I believe, and then
amplified and modified somewhat at Berkeley.  The "native" fonts were
translated into a bitmap on a per character-per font basis, so that using
troff, when one asks for a 24 point capital "T" the downstream filters
would assemble the right bitmap page by page for a Versatec electrostatic printer
dot by dot printer; turn the whole page sideways and then output the aggregate
to the printer.  Each page, by the way, was about a half-Mb of bit-map.
The Berkeley produced manual pages are produced that way; the observant will
notice a certain graininess to the curves of characters due only to the lack
of resolution of the plotter in question.
	At the Univ. of Colorado, CIRES, several people, managed to "crack" the
native Hershey fonts, discovering all sorts of map symbols, etc., in the process
that hadn't been transferred into the bit mapped versions.  Even Cyrillic
is included, along with a number of other strange Gothic versions.  That
led to the development, for internal use there, of the "Leroy" package,
which we contributed to the Usenix in 1981 (i think), for publication
quality plots.  Since a lot of geophysical work is done there ( where i am not
now), the general tone of Leroy lends itself to overlaying maps with various
sorts of "dots" for data points, various kinds of lines, tick marks, etc.
	The Usenet maps for the whole U.S. with all the different sites marked
(as best they can), were done in Leroy.  Later development was sort of
loosely handed over to the Computer Morphology folks as UCSD since all the
principals at Colorado are now long gone.
	The original Leroy core was done by one Dr. Martin Smith, who is
a geophysicist, in YACC.  Other major contributors were then doctoral grad
student Danny Harvey and Atmospheric Physicist Bob Strangeway.  Me? I'm just the
historian.  I think it's a tribute to the Unix tools environment that some
general purpose Fortran types could pull off something like Leroy, in about
3 months flat.
ernie harkins