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by dhosek
24 days ago
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For the work on Euler, this article¹ (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262...) goes into the whole Digital Typography program at Stanford for whom, one of the projects was creating those outlines for the Euler math fonts. It’s worth remembering that at the time, not only was Metafont the only outline-based font technology,² but things like scanners were rare to nonexistent and the bitmaps that were used to determine coordinates for the curves of the fonts were hand-drawn on fine-lined graph paper (and sent to Hermann Zapf for approval). ⸻ 1. Funnily enough this is the second time in two days that I’ve shared this article, albeit in different contexts. 2. As far as I know, although I could be wrong. |
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Surely Karow's Ikarus was earlier than that.
One of the main innovations of Metafont was the use of "pen"s, so that one would describe a single path and the software would trace it and imitate the use of one or more pens, to end with an outline of something with thickness, and essentially more curves. It mimics how drawing and writing actually happens.
AFAIK, Zapf did not like this approach at all, as he was used to design typefaces the traditional way, by specifying all the curves. Richard Southall embraced the new paradigm and used Metafont as it was supposed to be used, but produced only a couple of demo typefaces (mainly the nmt family) and a handful of commercial ones (I can now only remember Colorado, with Ladislas Mandel, used in the phone directories of US West). I think he also implemented Melior, but of course this was never distributed as it was a proprietary Zapf design.
Note: all the above are based on recollections of my discussions with Zapf, Southall, and Knuth, in the distant past. All my relevant printed materials are in a different country right now, and I don't have easy access to them.