Hershey Fonts: Not Chocolate, the Origin of Vector Lettering | Hacker News Reader

Hershey Fonts: Not Chocolate, the Origin of Vector Lettering

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Check out:

Calligraphy for Computers https://archive.org/details/hershey-calligraphy_for_computer...

Hershey Text V3 https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/hershey-text-v30/

Another plugin variant https://gitlab.com/Hirmer/Hardy-Hershey-Text

I used the Hershey fonts with a Versatec printer in the 1970s. We were running Unix 7th Edition.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X163.83A

https://github.com/blucz/Vector is a project that uses Hershey fonts to emulate a vector display terminal.

The Hershey Fonts are also widely used among many commercial electronic design automation applications: https://blog.horizon-eda.org/misc/2019/11/17/fonts.html

My favorite photo from this fun article is the oscilloscope clock:

https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/oscilloscope...

Ah, interesting. This is what OpenCV provides for drawing text. The typography is pretty low quality and other packages are needed to draw with system fonts.

The key to better Hershey typography is to low-pass filter/expand the strokes, which is what the physical pen would have done implicitly in the original system.

Anyone have any idea why Hershey includes a set of cyrillic fonts?

> Anyone have any idea why Hershey includes a set of cyrillic fonts?

It was developed at an American military lab in the mid-1960s. Do you really need to ask why it would invest in Russian language support?

A better question would be, "why did Hershey spend such efforts on Japanese kanji?" and the answer there seems to be that he was a calligraphy enthusiast and relished the challenge & demonstration of the power of his vector font approach. (And to be fair, if you read through the "Calligraphy for Computers" paper to the end and look at the dropcaps/initials, and kanji, it is very impressive for such an early system - I wonder how many decades you have to go forward to find a superior system in any kind of general use?)

Cool, this is the first time I've seen "Calligraphy for Computers". I hadn't realised Hershey was doing phototypesetting from the beginning, so my comment about a physical pen was a bit inaccurate.

However, the "Dot Size" section on p.9 suggests that the fonts were meant to be rendered with relatively high strokewidths: "...the effective diameter of the plotting dot is 2.9 raster units for the S-C 4010 printer. A diameter of 2.3 raster units has been reported for the S-C 4020 printer."

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