isg@reading.ac.uk (Intelligent Systems Group) (11/26/89)
Does anybody know about the availability of Hershey fonts under X11, OpenLook, Motif, etc? Thanks in advance Anthony.Worrall@Reading.ac.uk
oj@apollo.HP.COM (Ellis Oliver Jones) (11/30/89)
In article <1888@onion.reading.ac.uk> isg@reading.ac.uk (Intelligent Systems Group) writes: >Does anybody know about the availability of Hershey fonts under X11, >OpenLook, Motif, etc? Hershey pioneered computerized type by laboriously digitizing letterforms in the form of short line segments or strokes. To render Hershey's fonts you need a pen-plotter, or you need to emulate a pen-plotter on a screen by drawing line segments. On the other hand, X11's fonts are all prerecorded rasters (except for some emerging technology, similar to Royal fonts or Adobe Fontware which turns outlines into rasters on the fly.) So, if Hershey's fonts are available for use with X11, they're probably not packaged as "fonts" in the X11 meaning of the word. A couple of vendors have implemented GKS packages layered on X11, and it is possible that they used Hershey's stroke fonts to draw scalable type, but I don't know for sure. People have told me that the X11R2 font complement (X11 fonts with names such as vg-31 and vxms-37) appear to be rasterized versions of the Hershey fonts. I'm told that many of the XV11R2 font bitmaps came from Lisp Machines, Inc., prior to the demise of that company. Does anyone know the truth of these rumors? /Ollie Jones
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/03/89)
In article <47258461.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> oj@apollo.hp.com (Ollie Jones writes: >People have told me that the X11R2 font complement (X11 fonts with names such >as vg-31 and vxms-37) appear to be rasterized versions of the Hershey >fonts. I'm told that many of the XV11R2 font bitmaps came from Lisp Machines, >Inc., prior to the demise of that company. Another possible source for rasterized Hershey fonts from MIT is the rasterized Hershey fonts U of Toronto distributed a decade ago as part of its Versatec-typesetting software. (Later distributed, without credit, in 4BSD.) (We know MIT had this stuff, because it seems to have gone to Berkeley via MIT, losing the U of T credits in the process.) -- Mars can wait: we've barely | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology started exploring the Moon. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu