[HN Gopher] Find a Font (1976) [pdf]
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       Find a Font (1976) [pdf]
        
       Author : translocator
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2023-01-19 08:06 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (saildart.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (saildart.org)
        
       | slyrus wrote:
       | Ah, the good old days when your then-future CS professors wrote
       | the fonts you might use (Clancy and Harvey). Pretty sure most
       | soon-to-be CS profs aren't designing fonts these days.
        
       | moloch-hai wrote:
       | Either it fails to turn up Linux Libertine and Inconsolata, and
       | is a failure, or succeeds, and is superfluous.
       | 
       | ("Kill them all. God will recognize his own.")
        
       | zimpenfish wrote:
       | Mildly amused by the typo on page 7: "The noblest motive is the
       | pubic good"
       | 
       | Although, given the reference to Deep Throat later on, maybe it's
       | deliberate.
        
       | timdiggerm wrote:
       | Pretty funny that their priorities in alphabets were Greek,
       | Cyrillic, and...Tengwar.
        
         | watersb wrote:
         | The selection looks to me to be an emphasis on readable,
         | English technical typesetting... and then a collection of
         | experiments used to think about features they didn't want to
         | leave out.
         | 
         | Ligatures in Baskerville, mathematical typesetting, box
         | drawing... the layout specs for Tengwar, with its alternate
         | forms and ligatures.
         | 
         | I can't read Hebrew, so I have no idea how usable its
         | implementation is here, but Hebrew was plausibly the most
         | widely used right-to-left text system in North America at the
         | time of publication.
         | 
         | Blows my mind they were doing this in 1976.
        
       | Gipetto wrote:
       | This reminds me of my pre-press days where we had a binder full
       | of font sample printouts. Customers would pore over that for
       | hours...
        
       | drfuchs wrote:
       | Well, page 42 doesn't show it, but the Stanford Seal font had a
       | second, distorted, copy of the seal under a different character
       | code, to be used when you wanted it printed nearer the edge of
       | the paper rather than the center. This was because the XGP
       | printer didn't have the smarts to correct for the sweep of the
       | laser, resulting in the pixels near the edge of the page being
       | wider than those in the center. I'm told that this was due to it
       | really being a hacked Xerox copier, which had been designed to
       | just match the non-linearity of the scanner with that of the
       | output imager.
        
       | translocator wrote:
       | via the wonderful
       | https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2023/01/11/AI_at_Stanfor...
       | 
       | via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338578
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-19 23:03 UTC)