Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!laser-lovers From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers Subject: Re: public domain stroke fonts Message-ID: <1010@uw-beaver> Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 14:32:24 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1010 Posted: Tue Apr 9 14:32:24 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 06:04:45 EST Sender: daemon@uw-beaver Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 29 From: KRAMER The stroke fonts used by most software packages, DISSPLA, DI-3000, TEMPLATE and others (I am not sure about Plot-10 but I think they are the same) are generally called Hershey fonts, after A.V. Hershey. He digitized a number of character sets, in Simplex (one line), Duplex (2 lines) and Triplex (3 lines, naturally). Included are Roman, Greek, Script, Futura, Mathematical, Musical, Gothic (English, Italian and German) and special fonts. In addition, Japanese Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji were digitized. The digitzation was done on a grid of up to 1024 by 1024. Hershey wrote a report entitled "Calligraphy for Computers" while at the US Naval Weapons Laboratory - No. 2101 and dated 1 Aug 1967. In it he gives a discussion of character creation and presentation, which is mostly concerned with CRTs of the day, and some plotters. He also includes the hardcopy of the fonts, and explanation of their codes. The fonts are generally stored as X,Y pairs of endpoints of relative vectors. Negative displacments are expressed as 9's complement. Special code values indicate pen up and move commands, repeat this displacement or end of the character. The origin of the character is in the center of the character space. The fonts are not adjusted for size. Most of the commerical systems started with the Hershey fonts, and adapted the when needed. For example, they us the Duplex to define the boundry for area filled fonts. They may also store the relative vectors in a different manner. There have also been other fonts added to the set over the years and I believe there are not 64 Hershey fonts. The report and a tape with the data was available from the National Technical Information Center, but I do not seem to have the order number or address handy.