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> 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 w
by gwern 6y ago
> 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?)
- 082349872349872 6y agoCool, 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."