On 2018-11-12 9:51 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: These panels do appear to be typeset using commercial fonts, and yes in theory, we can track those down. --Toby

I have a large library of inlay panel pictures. I?m sure I did some drawings with text when I did the blank panels. (Just the holes for the lamps) I?ll have a look. If not I?ll match a font to a picture. Rod Smallwood Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Guy Dunphy via cctalk Sent: 13 November 2018 04:30 To: Toby Thain; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Font for DEC indicator panels At 09:58 PM 12/11/2018 -0500, you wrote: Hmm, I posted to the list about this 3 hours ago, and it hasn't appeared yet. Is there an extra vetting process for posts that include links to web sites? I included various links to font searching sites, cleaned-up samples of the DEC fonts search tools - that are very close or identical matches to the DEC panel fonts. Should I repost, or just wait till it appears? Guy

Guy said I sometimes find delays posting to cctalk when I (located +10 GMT) post before 10am local time, ie. it is still the previous day on the cctalk server and most of the rest of the world. My post seems to disappear for up to ten hours or so. I don't recall any trouble when I post after 10am local time, it appears pretty much immediately. Well that's what it seems to be like, I could be wrong but I don't worry about it too much. Regarding fonts on reproduced panels. This is a common problem in vintage vehicle restoration when reproduction dataplates are made and sold. Some of the repos are redrawn on computer and retyped with a close font. However this isn't really good enough for a demanding restorer. I've even seen a repro nomenclature plate with a typo, which would be annoying considering the cost of some of these things. If you have access to the original, nothing really beats reproducing the _image_ of the panel with all its nuanced spacing, miniscule changes in letter size and orientation and the like rather than recreating the panel. In Noel's case the originals are probably not at hand, so there is obviously no choice but to recreate them. I can't help with the font but it makes me think of the curved font on the front of the PDP-11 consoles and in the handbook where the lowercase t has a different length depending on whether it is in or at the end of a word. Steve.

I'm not sure if attachments work... if yes, here is my attempt at that font. I can post the FontForge source also if there is interest. Some of the letters are made up because I didn't have an actual example, the x is one. Most are taken from DEC documents. paul

I created https://github.com/pkoning2/decstuff -- you can find the handbook font in fonts/Handbook. While I was at it I also dropped my "TECO in Python" in the "teco" directory. paul

It would be great to find those but I haven't heard that they exist. The information might not be clear even if it's found. For example, there is a copy of the DEC color standard online. But the color references it gives are largely in obsolete systems, not the well understood Pantone system. So even if they can be translated the job is not easy. As for fonts, one comment says that those panels are "typeset". Don't count on that. Those that come from the era of phototypesetting might be, but phototypesetting was only just starting to appear when the earlier of those panels showed up. And while a phototypesetter might be used in the documentation department, it would seem like an expensive and underused tool for the department responsible for panel lettering. Standard templates seems more likely. Consider the history of the "digital" logo, as documented in the PostScript reconstruction of it. That's clearly an example where the lettering was done by a draftsman and reused ever since. Re Guy Dunphy's images: font_2 looks a lot like Microgramma, one of my favorite fonts. But it's not an exact match because the horizontal and vertical segments are curved in letters like O rather than being straight. font_3 looks like the "digital" blocks logo without the blocks, so you might grab the PostScript file to see if that works. On font names: "grotesk" (or "grotezk" in German) is a technical term for sans-serif fonts, so it applies to things like Helvetica and Futura. (Another term is "gothic" -- confusing to laymen who think of that as a term for "Old English" fancy fonts, which it is not.) Up to the 1970s or so, you'd typically find a given font design with a single name, chosen by the original designer and used as the trademark by the foundry selling that font. "Helvetica" and "Futura" are examples. Later, people started copying fonts when computers made that easy, and US law allows this because it protects the name, as a trademark, but not the shape. This is why early versions of CorelDraw shipped with hundreds of familiar fonts with unfamiliar new names, like "Swiss" instead of "Helvetica" , or "Gatineau" (?) instead of "Garamond". Microsoft adopted this trick also, giving us Arial (Helvetica) and "Times New Roman" (Times Roman) among many others. At this point, you're likely to find the most popular fonts with hundreds of names. By the way, copies are often inferior (the CorelDraw ones for example) in that they have a lot more line segments since they are essentially tracings of the original rather than expertly constructed shapes. If you can't find a good font, you can definitely trace the original images and make your own. That's more work than you might expect but with modern tools it isn't hard. I've done that with the DEC custom font that is used on the covers of the earlier PDP-11 handbooks and manuals, a long time ago with CorelDraw which isn't a good tool for that job. paul

On 11/12/2018 08:51 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Well, how DID they make panels? I'm guessing that in the beginning, it was all done manually with photo/optical technology, the same stuff they used to make boards. Also, used to screen print part numbers on sheet metal, power supply parts, etc. So, they may have gotten pre-made letters on some kind of carrier sheet, and transferred them to a mylar sheet, and then photographically reproduced that onto a master phototool, which was then used to make the silk screen. This would be all standard technology to anybody making PC boards in the 1960's - 1970's. While DEC got big enough to do this all in house or have one of the providers in this area make it for them, they also might have just picked a font they liked from somebody's catalog. A LOT of advertising signage and all sorts of graphics arts stuff was done by hand with photographic technology at that time. Bishop Graphics comes to mind as a provider of transferable lettering and of course, DIP component patterns and such. I suspect that they didn't get into any digital graphics technology until at least the later DEC-10 systems, so mid 1970's. Jon

On 11/13/2018 10:28 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Yes, thanks, that was another brand of this technology! Jon

At 10:11 AM 13/11/2018 -0600, you wrote: My mother was a commercial artist in those days, doing advertising, brochures, book layouts, illustrations, etc. And yes, you are right. For jobs with small amounts of text with various fonts they did it by hand using stick-down letters rub-transferred from sheets of letters. Then the offset printing sheets were produced photographically from the artist's layouts. Which incidentally allowed scaling, so the original stick-down fonts didn't have to be huge. Also it allowed distortion in X or Y, so standard fonts could be squished or stretched. Only they didn't use clear mylar film, just white card. Since unlike PCB production there were not such tight dimensional constraints. Also costs needed to be low. For instance that http://everist.org/pics/PDP-8S/fonts/font_2.png is very close to Eurostile that has been vertically squashed, blurred slightly to round line ends, and the slash inked by hand. Ref: http://everist.org/pics/PDP-8S/fonts/20181114_1680_eurostile.png (photo fromm book 'Computer type, M. Rogondino, 1991, pg 142.) You could mix hand-inked lettering with Letraset lettering since the photo-reproduction was forgiving of slight blemishes on the white and black. They saturated out. One company making the sheets of transfer lettering was Letraset. I recall using those films a few times in my teens (late 1960s) to put nice lettering on the faces of moving coil meters. I used Bishop tapes and pads for PCB layout a lot back then. They had some lettering but I don't think variety of fonts was their thing. Letraset had large catalogs of the fonts they had available. I'll see if I can find one of their catalogs at my mum's place. She still has all her art gear, including boxes of those lettering sheets. Btw, that post of mine never showed up. So some on the list saw it but it never reached me in Oz. Presumably some net filter didn't like the included links (to font source sites.) I've placed the text here: http://everist.org/pics/PDP-8S/fonts/2018113_to_cctalk.txt Guy