Page:NBS Technical Note 11176 (1983) (IAutilityprogramsf1176dick).djvu/11

 making new characters. This program is the main subject of this report. The second program, which is treated as an appendix to this paper, details utilities for combining individual Hershey characters on the hires screen for the creation of logos for use in other programs. It is meant to be illustrative of some of the possible applications of the Hershey fonts.

THE ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF THE HERSHEY FONTS

In the mid sixties. Dr. Allen V. Hershey undertook a project at the Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia, to automate the preparation of his highly mathematical reports and those of others involving complex chemical structures and electrical diagrams. That work produced a comprehensive suite of FORTRAN typographic programs; a repertory of occidental alphabets and oriental ideograms, cartographic symbols, etc. The typographic system has been fully documented in a series of NWL reports (1-5). Early applications of the system are to be found in Hershey' s own scientific publications (6-10) in which the system was honed.

More than 120 copies of the original system have been distributed (largely in card decks) to universities, industries, and government laboratories. Applications range from computer assisted typesetting to computer driven engraving machines with the output characters appearing on all types of printers and plotters (11). Although Hershey' s characters have been incorporated in many commercial graphics packages, unfortunately, they do not all acknowledge the source. NBS has used the system for well over ten years, and in 1976 undertook the publication, in book form (12), of the occidental fonts, and the distribution on magnetic tape (13), of the coordinates for both the occidental and orienta] characters. This was followed in 1978 by the publication of a subset incorporated in a Technical Note by N.W. Wolcott entitled "FORTRAN IV Enhanced Character Graphics" (14). Since then, the economic advantage of in-laboratory production of camera ready illustrations for research papers has led to the Utility Programs...