Hershey Fonts now 50 years old

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 6:53 AM, Shoppa, Tim via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> I grew up with X-Y scope displays, their associated electrostatic printers, and Calcomp pen plotters. To draw letters and symbols on these, we used Fortran libraries driven by data tables to make "Hershey Characters".

I came along later and started with rasterized character displays
(40x25) before I got my hands on rasterized graphic displays (up to
320x200 in the early days), but I did occasionally get some time on a
PDP-8 with a Tektronix 4010 terminal, and always did like the look of
vectorized text.

> This year, the Hershey Font system and libraries turn 50 years old: https://books.google.com/books/about/Calligraphy_for_computers.html?id=qFFCAAAAIAAJ

Cool.

> A little more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts
>
> Google Books https://books.google.com/books/about/Calligraphy_for_computers.html?id=qFFCAAAAIAAJ

Not remembering these by name, I went digging and found the original
1967 paper...

https://archive.org/details/hershey-calligraphy_for_computers

I'm astounded at how much effort went into rendering Japanese.

-ethan