Hershey is a textual vector font format
11 points by Internet_Janitor
11 points by Internet_Janitor
I’ve been working on a small (in-progress) collection of Hershey fonts if anybody is interested. They’re a little more modern than some of the other faces you’ll find online.
wow this is neat! When I was doing more plotter stuff I was bummed how few fonts there were. Yours are appealingly novel!
It'd be cool to see phoots of how they look when drawn with a plotter and a regular fat pen.
Looks handy!
I especially appreciate that the .jhf files you offer are well-structured. I've discovered that many of the Hershey fonts available online have had their id field set to 12345 for every glyph and include hard-wraps in some glyphs, both of which needlessly make it harder to parse the files and use them for drawing text.
I've been cleaning those up :)
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/hershey/tree/master/item/etc/cursive.jhf
Note that this is the Usenet Font Consortium (1986) re-spin of the Hershey data, which takes some very 1986 C programmer liberties with the original Calligraphy for Computers (1967, PDF) / [A contribution to computer typesetting techniques : tables of coordinates for Hershey's repertory of occidental type fonts and graphic symbols] (1976) data format. The original Fortran fixed-field format looks much easier to work with (despite the Usenet post's snarky “Not that anybody would really want to use their format …”) but the data tape formerly available from NTIS is presumed lost.
And again, thanks for the reminder that I need to finish/release/abandon my Hershey OTF conversion that I last looked at in 2016 or so: scruss/python-hershey. And hi to everyone who has had a shot at this maddening font format! Here's a new vector font rabbit hole for you: GIMMS, as used at the University of Edinburgh
Frank Grießhammer has some nice words and pictures and Hershey and his work: Frank Grießhammer
Hmm, no baseline?
The examples I've seen so far seem to vertically align glyphs to a uniform centerline. I suppose you could compute a baseline from the dimensions of a reference character like 0 so long as you have a mapping between glyph ids and ascii/unicode characters.