ewh@druky.UUCP (09/12/84)
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
dan@idis.UUCP (09/20/84)
568443 PB-263 925/0 A Contribution to Computer Typesetting Techniques, 9 track ASCII (Data file) Thompson, Robert C. National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C. Office of Standard Reference Data. Report No.: NBS-MT-12A; NBS/DF-77/002 Apr 76 mag tape Source tape is in ASCII character set. Character set restricts preparation to 9 track one-half inch tape only. Identify recording mode by specifying density only. Call NTIS Computer Products, if you have questions. Price includes documentation, PB-251 845. NTIS Prices: CP T05 Journal Announcement: GRAI7711 This tape consists of two files. The first file contains tables of coordinates which make it possible to generate 1377 different alphabetic and graphic characters on either COM devices or on digital plotters. The characters can be generated on vector plotters by connecting the points given in these tables. This method of digitizing graphic arts characters allows them to be generated on any device which can plot vectors of arbitrary length and direction. The tables are those published in NTIS documentation PB-251 845 entitled: 'A Contribution to Computer Typesetting Techniques: Tables of Coordinates for Hershey's Repertory of Occidental Type Fonts and Graphic Symbols.' A copy of this publication is included in this tape package. Descriptors: *Data file; *Composing; Plotters; Graphic methods; Magnetic tapes; Typography Identifiers: Computer output microfilm; Computer applications; *Typesetting; Type fonts; Hershey character set; NTISCOMNBS Section Headings: 9B (Electronics and Electrical Engineering--Computers); 14E (Methods and Equipment--Reprography); 62GE (Computers, Control, and Information Theory--General); 82C (Photography and Recording Devices--Recording Devices); 45E (Communication--Graphics)