laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/08/85)
From: Bob Brown <rlb@RIACS.ARPA> This may not be topical for this group, but a laser printer is involved and here is where font knowledge is concentrated on the net. I'm looking for information on public domain stroke font files, that is, characters defined solely by the use of line segments, circular arcs, and, perhaps, splines, all using a constant pen width. There are several plot packages around Ames (plot10, displa, etc) that all have about the same character set (serif, sans serif, gothic) leading me to believe they all come from the same source. Does anyone know what this source is, how I can get in touch with it, or if the font definitions in any of these common plot packages lies in the public domain? Thanks, I don't read this list any more, so make sure replies come directly to me. Bob Brown RIACS/NASA Ames ----------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/08/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> Without seeing your fonts I couldn't say for sure, but almost all of the current public domain fonts, both stroke and raster, come from the Hershey Occidental Character Set, created by Allen V. Hershey. His system and his fonts are written up in the journal @i[Computer Graphics and Image Processing], Volume 1, 1972, pages 373-385. There are also some fonts that are more or less in the public domain (I am not sure of their legal status) that are often called the Berkeley VFonts. These fonts came originally from the XGP printers at CMU, Stanford, and MIT, and the fonts for them were in general created by optical scanning of font catalogs at the low resolution of the XGP's. Perhaps the best source of information about these fonts is the Stanford AI Lab Operating Note 74, @i[Find a Font] by Les Earnest, dated May, 1976. You will find almost all of the fonts from the Berkeley distribution listed in this publication. I have no idea if it is still available, but all of the fonts are still online at SAIL and probably somewhere at CMU.
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/09/85)
From: John W. Peterson <JW-Peterson@UTAH-20.ARPA> I think the collection you're thinking of is the "Hershy Fonts". Unfortunatly, I don't know the source, but they are in the public domain. (An office mate "thinks they came from CMU...") Another source for that kind of font information is the MetaFont package, done by the TeX people at Stanford. -------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/09/85)
From: KRAMER <billk%udel-cc-vax2.delaware@UDEL-LOUIE.ARPA> 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.