Posted-Date: Fri, 26 Mar 93 09:00:29 -0500
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 93 09:00:29 -0500
From: jgg@proforma.com (J. G. Gregory)
Message-Id: <9303261400.AA00267@proforma.com>
To: rman@aero.org
Subject: Summary: stroked characters 

Many thanks for the quick and useful responses on the stroked fonts  
question.  Almost everyone said the same thing.  For the record, I will  
summarize here.

Once upon a time, a guy named Hershey, who worked at the National Bureau  
of Standards, digitized a large number of "glyphs".  These have been  
broken into "fonts".  There is a public domain package called "hershey"  
which includes the fonts and provides some software for reading them.  I  
found it on UUNET's big archive (the ls -lR file is 6mb uncompressed).

I haven't drawn any yet, but it appears the package is exactly what I  
was looking for, and is probably what is used by AutoCAD, and probably a  
good number of other CAD systems as well.

Of side interest, the glyphs are stored in a very obtuse and interesting  
way.  All glyphs are stored in the same [105K bytes] file (at least for  
all Roman (actually, Occidental) languages), and there are separate font  
files which point to certain glyphs in the big file.

Two years ago, I manually did a stroked font for a CAD system, since I  
didn't know about an alternative (and neither did my predecessors,  
apparently).  Now I have a complete set of fonts for almost nothing.   
Isn't the network great?

Thanks again to all who responded.
--J Gregory