Calling all typographers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 29, 2016, at 8:39 AM, steven at malikoff.com 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-digital-PDP11-masthead-for-the-H960-rack
> 
> 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.

Yes, my font doesn't have any kerning and the width data is a mess too.  I spent some time with FontForge, but now my Mac is acting strange (TextEdit recognizes the font after I install it, Word and Illustrator pretend it doesn't exist).

The way I would deal with the sort of project you mention is to use a tool like Illustrator (or other suitable vector graphics editor), enter the text using the "Handbook" font, then adjust letter positioning with the text positioning tools until it's correct.

As for the "digital" logo, it's been clearly established that using a standard font for that will be pretty inaccurate.  Fortunately, a correct version, in PostScript form, has been posted long ago by someone who traced it from the original master films at DEC.  Most drawing programs (Illustrator for one, of course) can import PostScript.

	paul