Hershey fonts
The Hershey fonts are a collection of vector fonts developed c. 1967 by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey at the
Naval Weapons Laboratory,[1][2][3] originally designed to be rendered using vectors on early cathode ray tube displays. Decomposing curves to connected straight lines allowed Hershey to produce complex typographic designs. In their original form the font data consists simply of a series of coordinates, meant to be connected by straight lines on the screen. The fonts are publicly available and have few usage restrictions.[4] Vector fonts are easily scaled and rotated in two or three dimensions; consequently the Hershey fonts have been widely used in computer graphics, computer-aided design programs, and more recently also in computer-aided manufacturing applications like laser engraving
.
Styles
Some glyphs were developed in four different versions, dubbed Simplex, Duplex, Complex and Triplex, which used different numbers of strokes to compose their contours.[4]
Coverage
The fonts include Latin, Greek,
NIST in 1976.[6]
Influence
The Hershey fonts were a major influence on the design of Minotaur, a typeface produced by the Parisian type foundry Production Type in 2014.[3] In 2015, German graphic designer Frank Grießhammer announced that he created an outline version that can be used in contemporary applications and it is released under an open source license.[7]
See also
References
- OCLC 654265615, NWL Report No. 2101. NTIS AD662398
- ^ About Hershey Vector Fonts, archived from the original on November 16, 2011, retrieved November 15, 2011
- ^ ISBN 9791093578057. Retrieved 15 September 2022.
- ^ a b http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/Hershey.htm Archived 2017-07-16 at the Wayback Machine states that the fonts may not be distributed in the format provided by National Technical Information Service. The fonts were distributed via Usenet in a character encoding.
- ^ Nagy, Randall (2014), The Hershey Font Explorer, Sourceforge.net
- OL 22001434M. Retrieved December 7, 2015.
- ^ "Hershey Fonts in use". Fonts in Use. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
- Wolcott, Norman M. (April 1978), FORTRAN IV Enhanced Character Graphics, National Bureau of Standards, NBS Special Publication 500-32
External links
- http://emergent.unpythonic.net/software/hershey
- http://sol.gfxile.net/hershey/index.html
- Video (28:31) of a lecture by Frank Grießhammer "The Hershey Fonts"
- Many Hershey fonts in .jhf format (James Hurt format) plus library code in C