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Hershey Fonts Revival

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  Hershey Fonts Revival Lawrence D’Oliveiro <lawrencedo99@gmail.com> - 2016-06-01 17:42 -0700
    Re: Hershey Fonts Revival scruss@gmail.com - 2016-06-03 07:53 -0700
      Re: Hershey Fonts Revival Lawrence D’Oliveiro <lawrencedo99@gmail.com> - 2016-06-03 18:03 -0700
        Re: Hershey Fonts Revival scruss@gmail.com - 2016-06-19 19:05 -0700
    Re: Hershey Fonts Revival luser- -droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2016-06-03 12:23 -0700
      Re: Hershey Fonts Revival Lawrence D’Oliveiro <lawrencedo99@gmail.com> - 2016-06-03 18:04 -0700

#2597 — Hershey Fonts Revival

Debian recently added a package that includes the Hershey fonts in its standard repo. Looking for something to test the user-fonts function in my Cairo binding, I created HersheyPy <https://github.com/ldo/hersheypy>. Then someone mentioned that Sun used to offer the Hershey fonts in PostScript Type 3 format, back in the day.

But, hey, that’s not hard to generate. So I added a script to convert them to that form.

Only trouble is, PostScript doesn’t handle Unicode very well...

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#2616

On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 20:42:54 UTC-4, Lawrence D’Oliveiro  wrote:
>
> … someone mentioned that Sun used to offer the Hershey fonts in PostScript 
> Type 3 format, back in the day.

They were also available for Ghostscript up to v6.0. They are the *.gsf files in this archive:
ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic/fonts/base35/ghostscript-fonts-other-6.0.tar.gz

They implement a Usenet Hershey Font format parser in PostScript.

Nice work on your library, btw. Re-encoding these fonts is a pain, especially from the Usenet format. Hershey's original record-based distribution (now lost, but the dedicated could OCR the various publications that list it) is a much cleaner format.

I've done some work on this, too, including:
* a small library and encoding vector: https://github.com/scruss/python-hershey
* some initial attempts to convert the fonts to outline OpenType: https://github.com/scruss/AVHershey-OTF

I really need to revisit the latter project, as I now have a better workflow that adds proper splined line joins and caps to the characters.

cheers,
 Stewart

73 de VA3PID!

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#2618

On Saturday, June 4, 2016 at 2:53:54 AM UTC+12, scr...@gmail.com wrote:

> Re-encoding these fonts is a pain, especially from the Usenet format.

I came up with a best-guess Unicode encoding for all the ones in the Debian package, excepting only the Japanese one. Did you know Unicode is still rather poor in meteorological symbols...

> * some initial attempts to convert the fonts to outline OpenType:
> https://github.com/scruss/AVHershey-OTF

I don’t see how you can do that without losing the character of the stroke fonts, namely the ability to do things like this <http://default-cube.deviantart.com/art/Line-Width-532951738> and this <http://default-cube.deviantart.com/art/Line-Style-533098314> and this <http://default-cube.deviantart.com/art/Outline-533116342>.

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#2660

On Friday, 3 June 2016 21:03:44 UTC-4, Lawrence D’Oliveiro  wrote:
> 
> > * some initial attempts to convert the fonts to outline OpenType:
> > https://github.com/scruss/AVHershey-OTF
> 
> I don’t see how you can do that without losing the character
> of the stroke fonts …

Well, yes, there are things you can do with stroke fonts that you can't do with outline fonts. The demand for outline fonts has been much greater, however, as they allow stroke weight nuances.

If you like true stroke fonts, you might appreciate the tiny vector font that Commodore implemented in around 190 bytes of ROM on their 1520 plotter:
https://github.com/Project-64/reloaded/blob/master/1520/rom/325340-01.s#L88

Incidentally, two of the Hershey texts are on Archive.org:

* Calligraphy for Computers - Hershey, A V : U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, VA : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/hershey-calligraphy_for_computers>

* A contribution to computer typesetting techniques : tables of coordinates for Hershey's repertory of occidental type fonts and graphic symbols <https://archive.org/details/contributiontoco424wolc>

The original tapes of the Hershey data are presumed lost.

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#2617

On Wednesday, June 1, 2016 at 7:42:54 PM UTC-5, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> Debian recently added a package that includes the Hershey fonts in its standard repo. Looking for something to test the user-fonts function in my Cairo binding, I created HersheyPy <https://github.com/ldo/hersheypy>. Then someone mentioned that Sun used to offer the Hershey fonts in PostScript Type 3 format, back in the day.
> 
> But, hey, that’s not hard to generate. So I added a script to convert them to that form.
> 
> Only trouble is, PostScript doesn’t handle Unicode very well...

I never finished my code, but we dug up a lot of resources in this thread:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.postscript/NeY13Wylpdg/discussion

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#2619

On Saturday, June 4, 2016 at 7:23:37 AM UTC+12, luser- -droog wrote:

> I never finished my code, but we dug up a lot of resources in this thread:
> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.postscript/NeY13Wylpdg/discussion

That is neat. I have downloaded the linked files.

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