wallen (10/29/82)
Does anyone have a description of the format of the "hershey vector fonts"? These are ascii files which describe about twenty fonts and orginated, I think, at the Naval Post Graduate School. I have some software which uses some of the fields, but a large amount of the data is not touched. There is a "character" file which describes, I think, the size of the character (relative to a 100x100 grid). And a "font" file which has the actual vectors and a lot of other (unknown) stuff. Any info would be greatly appreciated. (struct definitions would be fabulous). Mark Wallen (ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!wallen or wallen@nprdc)
dan (11/02/82)
I found the BYTE magazine that used the book by Hershey as a reference. It is March 82, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 186-196. The article gives some example character fonts and a microsoft basic program that one of the authors of the article wrote to generate some of the charcter fonts. The reference for the work by Hershey is: Wolcott, N.M. and J. Hilsenrath. A Contribution to Computer Typesetting Techniques: Tables of Coordinates from Hershey's Repertory of Occidental Type Fonts and Graphic Symbols. Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Standards Special Publication No. 424, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. Out of print. Dan Ulrich Hemodialysis Lab, Purdue University pur-ee!dan or pur-ee!ecn-pa.dan
ecn-pa:ecn-pb:rick (11/03/82)
>From NBS Special Publication 424 "Tables of Coordinates for Hershey's
Repertory of Occidental Type Fonts and Graphic Symbols"
Page 5:
In the Hershey system, characters are drawn by connecting lines
between successive (x,y) coordinate paris. The coordinates of
each character are given in 'raster coordinates', which are integers
ranging from +49 to -49. The (x,y) coordinates for each character in
the occidental repertory are given in Appendix A. A useful qunatitiy is
the printer's em, or the distance between the bottoms of two successive
lines of close packed text. The em is 32 raster units for characters in
the principal size, and 21 raster units for the indexical size.
The table in Appendix A is organized in the following way: The
first column is the character, the fisrt pair of numbers seperated by
colons (:) are the left and right boundaries of the character is raster
coordinates, and succeeding pairs of numbers set off by colons denote
the (x,y) set for that character. An (x,y) coordinate pair of (-64,0)
indicates that the pen is lifted at that point in the character; a
coordinate pair of (-64,-64) indicates that the end of the character
has been reached.
------------------------
Presumably what you have is Appendix A. If you intend to do anything
with the tables, buy the book. It only cost $2.90 when I bought mine
(1978).
Rick Adams