Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ames!sdcsvax!nosc!humu!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.UUCP (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Macintosh Fonts
Message-ID: <1383@uhccux.UUCP>
Date: 26 Dec 87 17:11:12 GMT
References: <546@oscvax.UUCP> <1308@uhccux.UUCP> <19722@amdahl.amdahl.com> <1293@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Organization: U. of Hawaii, Manoa (Honolulu)
Lines: 28
Summary: Hershey fonts are PD and should look so-so.

In article <1293@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>...
>	Also, can anyone comment on the quality of the (I believe) public
>domain Hershey and NBS fonts? And I guess their PD status as well...

It seems pretty clear that the Hershey fonts in NBS form or the form
they assume in the posting in vol. 4 of mod.sources are public
domain.  The data for the occidental fonts was published in an
NBS bulletin, and nothing was said there about restrictions on
use.  This data was distributed as part of a commercial program
Fancy Font, and the accompanying documentation for the version
I saw referenced the NBS publication, but made no mention of any
restrictions on use of that data.  The documents with the mod.sources
distribution say that the National Technical Information Service
does restrict the Hershey data, but only in the particular form
in which NTIS distributes it (which is different from that of
the mod.sources distribution).

As to quality, they look nice enough at 300dpi on a laser printer,
but not as nice as Computer Modern, to my eye.  At 120dpi on
a dot matrix printer or at 72dpi on a crt screen, without
special provision for adjusting dots to a low-resolution
raster, they're so-so.  Clearly worse than what can be done
with hand editing of dot matrixes.  I haven't seen them on
an Amiga screen -- I would expect some hand-editing of the
dots to be necessary for legibility at such a low resolution.

	Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu