Find a Font (1976) [pdf]

https://saildart.org/allow/pdf/SAILON/74/find-a-font.pdf

by translocator • 4 years ago

18 8 4 years ago

saildart.org

translocator• 4 years ago

via the wonderful https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2023/01/11/AI_at_Stanfor...

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34338578

slyrus• 4 years ago

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.

drfuchs• 4 years ago

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.

timdiggerm• 4 years ago

Pretty funny that their priorities in alphabets were Greek, Cyrillic, and...Tengwar.

watersb• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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...

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

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.

moloch-hai• 4 years ago

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.")

Find a Font (1976) [pdf]

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