4 ms·
Those who remember old Borland’s graphics.h, remember it came with an interesting set of fonts. Those were born in the 50’s and are known as “Hershey fonts”. T
by marcodiego 5y ago
Those who remember old Borland’s graphics.h, remember it came with an interesting set of fonts. Those were born in the 50’s and are known as “Hershey fonts”.
There is a modern implementation compatible with the old Borland fonts: http://libxbgi.sourceforge.net/ http://libxbgi.sourceforge.net/
Disclaimer: I implemented it.
Watching bgidemo.c running correctly on a modern machine is indescribably cool.
- miohtama 5y agoNice work! If I recall correctly, I used these when I was studying C in high school.
- marcodiego 5y agoI’m sad to see graphics.h is still used in Pakistan, India and Brazil.
- waynecochran 5y agoThat's sad because its antiquated and means folks are still using DOS?
- marcodiego 5y agoThat's sad because it means there was no evolution in the last 20 years. People learn something, teach it and it gets frozen. Nothing new is learnt for decades.
- waynecochran 5y agoIt's weird there is someone still teaching using Borland C ... that is early 1990 stuff... and using DOS! That's closer to 30 years! It must be a cost thing.
- marcodiego 5y agoI don't think it is a matter of cost. I think it is a matter of what the teacher knows. Just to be clear: I didn't say Borland C is still used in Brazil. But you still can find CS courses teaching graphics.h just the same way. Actually, if it is used just for demo purposes I'd see no problem, it is still somewhat adequate for the purpose. I doubt that, though.
- miohtama 5y agoStill using DOS is not sad. Writing this on my Windows 11.
- chrismorgan 5y agoInkscape supports converting text to a variety of stroke fonts: Extensions → Text → Hershey Text. The fonts are SVG, stored in /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/svg_fonts/ under Linux. I recently took EMS Readability from there and adopted it into a code base that is generating reMarkable documents with strokes and all (rather than PDFs) in support of reverse-engineering actually good rendering, as I wanted text in my generated documents.
- eloisius 5y agoI’ve seen some references to Hersey fonts in OpenCV’s text rendering. I wonder if those are from the same lineage.
- Pinus 5y agoVery likely. For some background on the Hershey fonts, the tech stack where they were born, and mr. Hershey himself, there is this presentation by Frank Griesshammer: https://vimeo.com/178015110 https://vimeo.com/178015110 .