29 Apr
2016
29 Apr
'16
7:06 a.m.
On 29/04/2016 13:39, steven at malikoff.com wrote:
schoedel at kw.igs.net wrote
Hi Steve
Well I'm right in the middle of trying to figure out font
forge. Its a camel (a horse designed by a committee)
I just about managed to alter and save one character.
The H960 top title panel like yours is on my list but a ways off as I
have to make and first ship the rest of the pdp-8 range and all of the
PDP-11/XX systems that had key and lamp front panels.
I have a top class local silk screen studio who are keen to do this kind
of high grade work . All manual and requiring great skill.
I took one look and said you do it! The lady who runs the business and
does my work it said it only took five years on top of an arts degree
to get this far.
She also said they could not do the artwork because they could not
draw. So I don't print and they don't draw and all is calm.
They are working by eye down to sub-millimeter levels using very fine
very taut screens registering up to ten layers with drying time.
They use huge heavy cast vacuum tables about 10 feet square and three
feet deep. There's a sort of an X-Y contraption on top to move the
screens about.
I just sit there and watch one or two twenty-five year old female rear
ends stuck up in the air.
One day a muffled voice from the depths of one table said you can come
over here and look you will see better. I said no that's fine I can see
quite well from here.
One of the other girls was drinking a cup of coffee and observed this.
She spluttered and coffee went everywhere. Give here her due she just
said sorry I sneezed!
On top of that they are all registered colourists. They can look at a
colour and write down the correct code to get the (expensive) ink made up.
Another batch due for delivery on Tuesday (Bank Holiday on Monday here)
Regards Rod
Me I'm colour blind but all layer
So once I have the positive masters (black = ink) on to very expensive
HP clear film using a HP Dj120 24inch plotter
I just hand them plus .svg file from inkscape with all of the layers
(up to ten) registered
On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:19:43 +0100, Rod Smallwood
wrote
I've also had a go at the dec font for the purpose of those
'good enough' mastheads I
posted about here last year:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/entry.php?544-A-good-enough-replica-of-the-digit…
I too found the font to be mostly circles and tengential lines except for the 's'
which
gave me a lot of trouble to draw nicely in my CAD program. I'm puzzled about the
notion
of 'o' not being a perfect circle as I found it to be quite so, at least on the
masthead.
As mentioned there are different 't's. I treat the whole masthead as an integral
CAD drawing -
I'm not trying to replicate Paul's near-enough Corel-drawn font (which I
examined) but
rather a correctly spaced and kerned piece of text, just as it is on the masthead.
I've made some test cuts in paper and vinyl on my CNC stencil cutter for both a
positive
(stick-on decal) and negative (for silkscreening) and the results are fairly promising,
but
I put it aside a while ago so I just need to find some time to get back into it.
Steve.
But they built it out of circles and straight
lines and that's what I do.
That's superficially, but not exactly, true.
Even the 'o' is not a perfect
circle, and you can't get close to replicating the 's' or the digits that
way.
I took a stab at replicating the 'classic dec' font about a decade ago,
following
scanned DEC manuals wherever possible. I built up most of the basic ASCII set in
the outline form before suspending the project. (I suspect the solid form can
mostly be derived from paths through the middle of the outline strokes.) It did
get used a few years ago by our Jason T for some VCF Midwest graphics -
https://picasaweb.google.com/102190732096693814506/VCFMW50OfficialGraphics#…
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