LWN: Comments on "Reviving the Hershey fonts"

Re: PostScript Type 3 fonts

ldo — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 03:51:02 +0000

You mean, like this?

Reviving the Hershey fonts

acoopersmith — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 06:53:24 +0000

The Hershey fonts were provided as PostScript Type 3 fonts in Sun’s X11/NeWS environment long ago - for instance, see page 479 of the pdf of O'Reilly's X Window System User’s Guide: OpenLook Edition for a reference to them. Unfortunately, they were never published under an open source license for use beyond that, so are essentially lost to history now.

Reviving the Hershey fonts

redden0t8 — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 15:28:54 +0000

Modern AutoCAD supports two types of fonts - Truetype and "shape" based fonts. The shape based fonts are in a proprietary (but open) vector format that contains instructions on how to trace the letters from simple lines, conceptually similar to Hershey's original format. Lineweight, etc can then be assigned as with any other line in AutoCAD.

A large portion of the included shape fonts appear to be based on Hershey's work. I really enjoyed learning more about the origin. It also makes the font names make more sense - for historic reasons, they're all 8 characters or less which makes them a little cryptic until you know the back story.

You Can Use Them To Render Text In Cairo ...

ldo — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 03:18:14 +0000

... with the help of my HersheyPy project.

Reviving the Hershey fonts

ewen — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 22:33:13 +0000

For those following along at home, this file in the source tree online appears to be twin_glyphs.c:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/twin/tree/libtwin/twin_font_d...

(It still has that name in the CVS $Id:$ string, but the filename seems to have changed at some point since it was first created.)

AFAICT the Twin code is GPL'd but it looks like the font data itself is a BSD/MIT style license.

Ewen

Reviving the Hershey fonts

keithp — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:33:36 +0000

Nice to see these glyphs getting more love — I first encountered them when writing plotting software for HP pen plotters and Ramtek displays in the 1970s. More recently, I used the simplest of them in my 'twin' window system, also converting them to use splines for the curved sections and extending the range to cover ASCII. Here's a link to the paper I wrote about that, and the source code; the font is encoded in a compact representation in twin_glyphs.c

https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2005/ols2005v2-pages-33-42...

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/twin/

Hershey fonts in Turbo Pascal

dh — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 12:00:54 +0000

I remember that these fonts were packaged in Turbo Pascal v4 and up to be able to print text in graphics mode (yes, that *was* a difference back in 1988...). Borland published the fonts without any reference to the original designer but the German computer magazine c't "revealed" the original source of the fonts in January 1990. That article included a description of Borland's file format and an extension which added umlauts ("ä") to the font files. I hope, the modern reincarnation also includes these non-US special chars.

Being defined in straight line segments, Hershey's fonts are even more a true ancestor of today's vector-based font descriptions which use more complex lines. Truly amazing that this work is about 50 years old...