On 28/04/2016 16:07, Paul Koning wrote: OK I have grabbed the VCF stuff. Anything that takes the Panel Project forward really helps. I have shipped a number of panels already and now I'm on version 3 of the PDP-8 panels. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood

On 29/04/2016 13:39, steven at malikoff.com 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 29/04/2016 16:39, Paul Koning wrote: The logo I am now using on my panels came off an old disk from my days at DEC. It would have been copied from a bromide sub master using a drum scanner. It was I think postscript as that's what the trade mags were accepting. I did find that one website about the dec logo had the same version as mentioned above. If you want to see how things were look for a youTube video called The great 202 jailbreak. If anybody has found or made or knows a download URL of any dec font it would help me of I could get hold of it. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood

On 29/04/2016 17:18, Paul Koning wrote: I'm close to you most on of them. That means mine can't be too bad

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I think this is the one: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200712/ancient_history_the_digital_logo.html Kyle

Paul wrote: for one, of course) can import PostScript. I considered the Batchfelder 'digital' logo for my masthead design (having converted it from Postscript to SVG) and it's a beautiful piece of work. Due to its copyright, I could not incorporate it into my own work so I drew my 'digital' by blowing up the masthead image very lrge and manually tracing the edges with vectors and fitted splines. It took a lot of hours to do this. Afterwards I converted the splines to arc segments for generating the DXF then further conversion to SVG for stencil cut testing. One observation about converting old pieces of text to fonts. In my military vehicle restoration hobby, almost all old WWII vehicles have etched dataplates ('nomenclature plates' as they are called). There is a thriving market in reproductions of these, and are available for a large range of vehicles. Some are better than others. The better ones are done by treating the text, lines and spacing on the plate as an image. That way, the kerning, serifs and peculiarities of the original hand-typographed font are preserved. The inaccurate repros are done by retyping the plate using a near-enough modern font. I have seen one of these plates on eBay that even has a typo in it. That was annoying because it was a copy of a rare one I need for my own vehicle restoration. Steve.

I think you have to look at things in the context of the time. There was little or no CAD and books were done with photo typesetters (very expensive) Each page was a kind of photograph called a bromide Non standard things like logos where also stored on a bromide. Quite often if you wanted to add a symbol or logo to a page or a drawing you could go through a process to get a copy from a master and stick it on the page (real cut and paste) or dig out your micrometer and draw it using your normal black ink drawing pens. Rod (Panelman) Smallwood On 30/04/2016 23:24, Kevin Schoedel wrote:

On 28/04/2016 16:32, Jon Elson wrote: I haven't where would I find it? Rod

On 28 April 2016 at 13:05, Jon Elson <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote: I believe the current easiest to get up and running TeX/LaTeX solution for Windows is MikTeX. <http://miktex.org/> I don't know if it comes with the METAFONT utilities for creating a font though. Then again I haven't looked too hard since it has xeLaTeX which means "balls to it, I'm using OpenType!" (And there was much rejoicing, as Computer Modern was replaced by Adobe Garamond Premier Pro.) But I digress. Christian -- Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove STCKON08DS0 Contact information available upon request.

On 29 April 2016 at 02:11, Paul Birkel <pbirkel at gmail.com> wrote: Instead of using that package list, I prefer to just browse CTAN directly: <https://www.ctan.org/> Since that's ultimately where MikTeX downloads packags from. Also, CTAN includes the package documentation (if it has any), which is handy when using some of them. ("Halp, how can use pgfplots?" "Have you tried reading the manual?" "THERE'S A MANUAL!?") About the comicsans package: It's <current year>, use xeTeX/xeLaTeX or LuaTeX/LuaLaTeX and fontspec to use Comic Sans directly from the TTF file. An aside on Comic Sans: Even though it's a pretty bad typeface, it is apparently really readable by those with dyslexia. There's still better typefaces for that kind of application. Regards, Christian -- Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove STCKON08DS0 Contact information available upon request.

On 28/04/2016 17:18, Paul Koning wrote: Oh I tried that one. Very powerful I'm sure but I could not get it to do anything. Got as far as loading an empty font and picked a letter o goes to some kind of blank edit screen, click along top menu nothing about lines or circles get to help and drop down menu. Click on help and it comes up with something about glyphs I don't want Egyptian writing so I give up R

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:43:30 +0100, Rod Smallwood wrote shows that it is quite happy to draw straight lines, including doing obvious stuff like line segments forced to be horizontal or vertical, or circles or ellipses. Bezier curves too, of course. Fontforge went through a period after the original author retired when it was constantly broken. The version obtainable via http://fontforge.github.io/ should be better now (but I haven't used it lately). -- Kevin Schoedel <schoedel at kw.igs.net> VA3TCS