Tonight I'm going to talk to you about the heresy fonts.
But before I start talking about the actual fonts, I have to talk to you about how I discovered them.
You might have heard about the website Typografica. It is something like a blog or an online magazine.
It sleeps most of the year, but in the beginning of the new year there are always typefaces reviews.
I think that people talk too little about typefaces, especially outside the context of marketing.
I always sit down to write a review of a typeface that I really like of the year before.
For instance, I have written about Alan Blackman's say cheese.
Alan is here in the audience because I thought it deserved a second look.
In 2014 I wrote about the typeface Minotaur by Jean-Baptiste Levé.
I actually wrote about it in 2015, but it was released in 2014.
I was intrigued by the design. I was intrigued by its set of Lombardic caps.
I was curious why somebody would decide to design a typeface built out of straight lines only.
In his specimen Jean-Baptiste says the typeface is based on AV heresy series for early vector-based computing.
Who is AV heresy? What series?
What is early vector-based computing?
By the end of this evening you will have responses to at least the first two questions.
The third one I still don't know.
I did some lazy research, of course.
I found this Wikipedia page which is a little bit sad.
There is almost nothing on it.
But it contains three essential pieces of information.
Collection of vector fonts developed in 1967.
1967 was pretty early for digital typefaces.
Naval weapons laboratory. Very intriguing.
Fonts are publicly available. Also intriguing.
I dug deeper and I did some in-depth research.
I have to do some shout-out to archive.org, a local organization.
I found a report called Calligraphy for Computers by this guy, Hershey AV.
Calligraphy for Computers. Isn't that a cute name? I really like it.
Hershey writes about the problem of digitization of letters on a course grid.
He writes about an application of ingenuity to achieve a pleasing effect for polygons.
And he writes about type design as an artistic challenge.
All of those words are very intriguing as well and they provide an insight about the person.
This is a equation with which he calculated the perfect ellipsis or oval on a page.
So both artistic and extremely technical at this paper.
Now, this paper didn't only contain equations.
It also contained those illustrations of letters which were very fascinating.
Something like this is also very fascinating. Look at this code up here.
This code is necessary to plot this kind of sun symbol. I don't know what it is for.
But it didn't only contain those pixelized symbols.
It also contained symbols that were seemingly made of vectors.
Here, very simple ones, more complex ones.
Cyrillic ones and Lombardi caps.
And also Japanese characters.
This whole document is like 250 pages long.
24 pages of which are texts and the rest are all filled with characters.
So through very long research and in-depth research, I found out who Alan Vincent Hershey was.
He grew up not far from here in Berkeley. He was born in Idaho.
He graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in physics.
And for most of his life, he worked for the Navy.
He worked at the U.S. Navy Base in Dalgren, Virginia, also known as Navy Weapons Laboratory as a physicist.
He won the Ed Ross Award in 1978.
If anybody can tell me what kind of award it is, I would appreciate it very much
because I have not found anything on the web about this award.
In 1979, he moved to Monterey to teach at the Navy Postgraduate School.
This is a world premiere nobody has ever seen how Mr. Hershey looks.
I am very glad to have talked to his daughter, Dolly Donhauser,
who was very nice and provided me with many images and stories.
He looked kind of serious in this photo. That's why she sent me another photo
where you see him working in the garden next to his daughter, Dolly.
Alan Hershey was a theoretical physicist. He researched mostly things that are way over my head.
He had publications that include research on shipwaves,
the influence of submerged ship hulls on waves that flow over it, the behavior of liquids.
Apparently, work was his passion. He didn't stop working when he came home at night.
He and his wife, Ever Jane, they apparently discussed equations at the dinner table.
But he was not only a mathematician, he was also an artistic personality with a sense for aesthetics.
And I haven't seen any proof of that, but I have read in many places that he was also a calligrapher.
So how did Hershey design those letters that he showed in his report?
Well, that's easy. He laid down a grid and he drew a line.
Another one.
First letter designed. That was very easy.
Instead of all on paper, I encourage you to check out the exhibition in the back here.
There are five exquisite, very meticulous drawings of letters all perfectly exactly drawn on this grid paper.
They are really, really amazing.
He did not only draw Latin letters, but he also drew Japanese, as you know.
Dolly Donharzer told me there are over 200 sheets that contain six Japanese ideographs each.
So this must have been quite an amount of work.
What was Hershey's motivation?
Hershey's work consisted of writing reports, making calculations, doing technical reports.
Like this one, measured versus computed surface wave trains of a Rankine ovoid.
I need to research half of the title already.
So I didn't read that whole report because there's mostly stuff like this.
You see there's a lot of equations in the report.
Now, there was no tech back in the day for mathematical typesetting.
This was the way mathematical typesetting was done.
This photo is from Mark Simonson. He loves it because of the typewriter. It looks like a monster.
I love it.
And, of course, the very typewriter here also didn't have all the symbols on it.
You couldn't just copy some unicode character. It didn't have emoji, nothing.
That's why you had a thing called a typeit.
A typeit was a plastic symbol character that you had to attach to the keyboard
and remember on the keyboard where that typeit was in your typewriter to type that omega or phi.
That must have been really tedious.
Hershey worked on replacing this kind of workflow.
He wanted to be able to typeset things faster and easier.
However, in his report, he concluded that it was almost possible not yet.
Now, what was it like to work at the Navy in the Naval Weapons Laboratory?
One can only guess because not a lot of photos exist, but I imagine it to be something like this.
What those two, this lady and this gentleman, are doing is working on a computer called NORC.
The Naval Ordinance Reference Calculator.
I have a nice video that introduces the NORC here.
With the program tape in place and each of the 8 units set to read in data at the rate of 70,000 decimal digits a second,
NORC is ready for a test.
The culmination of an 8-year program of research and development that was IBM from drawing board to finished product.
So that's NORC.
At the time, the fastest computer in the world.
I don't know how many times NORC would fit into an iPhone today, but I think it's a couple of times.
The output of NORC used to be paper.
Here you see printed paper, you would have something called a line printer attached to the computer that would print out any kind of results from your calculations.
There was no such thing as a screen.
Here you see the, I like this photo a lot because of the great R here.
You see people concentrated on the NORC computer and this is from some kind of catalog.
You see those arrows go down to some kind of descriptions.
And the NORC had something called an ultra high speed optical printer, which made it stand out even more.
The ultra high speed optical printer was a General Dynamics SC4020.
For recording information from digital computers, General Dynamics Electronics uses a device called the Karatron shaped beam tool.
It uses electrons in a manner different from other cathode ray tools.
In the Karatron tool, electrons from the cathode are focused into a beam and accelerated by a tubular element called an electron gun.
The beam is aimed by selection plates at a particular spot on the tube matrix.
The matrix of the tool is a stencil with tiny alphanumeric and symbolic characters photo-etched through its surface.
The electron beam is extruded through a particular character aperture in this matrix, taking on the shape of that character.
A second accelerator in the tube neck speeds up the extruded beam.
The deflection yoke aims the beam at its selected place on the tube face.
When the electron beam hits the phosphor on the back of the tube face, it produces visible light.
This light has the shape of the selected matrix character.
The character is reproduced precisely and brightly.
Beam shaping eliminates the complex circuitry, the waste of time, the non-uniform illumination found in other character generating methods.
Characters and symbols available in the Karatron shapes beam tube can be much more complex than those generated by other methods.
A leading research laboratory uses the SC-4020 to draw pictures.
A space vehicle scheduled to orbit the far side of the moon carries a TV scanner with a 200 line scan.
Signals from the vehicle are computer processed on the ground and an input tape for the SC-4020 is prepared.
The digitized picture of the moon's surface is recorded by overlaying the Karatron tube face with plot stops.
Satellite orbits are drawn from the ephemera's information.
These drawings in spherical coordinates can be prepared rapidly with updated tracking information.
These then are a few of the applications of the SC-4020.
Curve plotting, printing, toolpath plotting,
pert charts, mapping, and many other results of calculation.
No other proven computer output device matches this versatility and speed.
The effective uses of the SC-4020 are limited only by the ingenuity of the user.
In the SC-4020, man has a device to make marks with speeds never possible before.
This device has all the versatility of man's own hand. It lets man make his mark with unprecedented creativity.
So this video is kind of interesting. The part where the letters are projected was originally developed for the Social Security Administration.
So they could write many things at once.
But what Hershey used was actually the drawing part. And the drawing part, you saw maps and you saw like the satellite orbit.
And things like that were done by using the period of a particular stencil and used the period as a drawing tool.
One Karatron tube was basically one font. So if you wanted to change the font, you had to change the whole tube.
This is a pretty simple flow chart how this thing works.
It's very similar to a laser jet today, I guess, but probably 1,000 times bigger.
So you have the input here. You have the tube that creates those light images.
And this is all light in closed space.
You have a camera that photographs every step that the tube makes.
And then the film gets developed and again exposed on paper.
I like the output bin here where everything just falls in.
And there is much marketing text about the SC4020.
And this text illustrates quite well what happened before and after this technology was introduced.
The computer generates only numbers and symbols on paper.
An army of draftsmen and clerks convert the figures into charts, graphs and drawings.
Karatron can transform numbers into picture form that everybody can understand and use.
So those guys at the bottom are, of course, sad.
A new microfilm printer does the work of 25 men on half the cost.
This guy at the top is happy, but that's how it always is.
The SC4020 printer was a technical milestone.
The tube was the secret. You already understood that.
And this was also the first time computer animation was made possible.
Here is another schematic image of the tube.
The light shines through the matrix which produces a letter or just a dot which can then be moved.
Those are some example output images.
This here is like for chemistry.
This is probably some kind of ship hull calculation.
And this here is for fun. Here is in NORC, which is you happy birthday.
There we go.
Hershey had worked with a Karatron.
He had, there are two reports at least that document his work with the tube.
The first one from 1959.
Plotting of curves and alphabet on the NORC CRT printer.
CRT means cathode rate tube printer.
And then 63, plotting of maps on a CRT printer.
This is one of those maps that he plotted.
And there were no Google maps at the time.
This was like the only digital map that existed.
He also used vectors for ships since he knew how to calculate liquids and fluids.
He did calculations for the bodies of ships.
This is like the stern of a ship here.
And you see there are quite some nice curves in this ship's body.
And here you see the laboratory log.
Mr. Hershey here at the left with one of his maps.
And he is on the front page of the newspaper in Dalgren because of this new achievement.
So the SC4020 was normal, was the state of the art when Hershey wrote his first report.
But the SC4060 was an improvement released 13 years later.
The pace of computers is definitely faster today.
It was faster and used a smaller electron beam and had a higher resolution.
This also resulted in a new report by Hershey.
And this new report contained example illustrations.
And it also contained this page, which is something like a type specimen.
It contains symbols.
And first and foremost, it was set using that technology.
So the step from the SC4020 to the SC4060 led Hershey to the conclusion that the system can now be used to create mathematical reports.
Success. That is very nice to see.
Hershey won the Ed Ross Award in 1978.
I felt this was probably the best moment to show this image.
Still don't know about the award, but I assume it has to do with this image here, his work.
So now, if we look at his designs, they are actually quite exhaustive, especially for the way they have been done.
There are five optical sizes.
Five optical sizes, almost no typeface has that today.
Fortran, cartographic, indexical, principle, and triplex.
There is a number of stroke styles, simplex, duplex, complex, and triplex.
This is probably a mistake here. There should be a single stroke, but you haven't seen it.
And there is a number of very, one would say, maybe superfluous styles, like this calligraphic style here, or the Lombardic again,
or like some Gothic Schwabacher style age.
I think he did all those styles because he wanted to test the machine.
He wanted to test the machine for different environments.
Fourteen styles, fifteen hundred Western characters, eight hundred Japanese characters.
The high quality of the Hershey fonts is definitely very impressive, even today.
And Hershey was a very smart scientist.
He taught himself calligraphy.
He used proper references, and he even learned the structure of the Japanese ideographs for the demonstration
that it could be done writing Japanese with this SC4060 system.
Here is one example for the Leroy lettering set, which was the basis for the very simple Fortran style.
Maybe you know that from comic books. Many comic books were lettered using that system.
And when I say that he used legitimate resources, this is actually in the bibliography of his first paper,
Gaudi, Siechholt, Weiss is in there.
I think I have heard those names before.
My conclusion is Alan Hershey was a type designer, perhaps without knowing it.
He was a very analytical thinker, he was artistic, and he had a lot of patience.
Now, what's happening to Hershey fonts today?
The fonts are available in public domain, as is his research, but the data structure is somewhat strange.
This is what you find when you look for Hershey fonts.
Every single one of those lines is one character.
Now, if we focus on this one character, I can explain you a little bit.
He can break that character down after every nine years.
It is basically offsets from the center.
An offset is calculated as offsets from the index of the letter R.
The index of the letter R is 82.
A string like MTWT would mean M is 5, T is minus 2, W is minus 5.
So this means 5 minus 2 minus 5, 2.
Breaking down the code again, we have the code of the character, number of commands, side bearings,
and then you have basically the line drawing commands similar to a post script letter.
This is still not clear what kind of letter it would be.
Here it is, a simple A.
This data format results in the Hershey font being distributed in very esoteric ways.
Basically, it's just proof of concept, windows.
You can select and click characters.
You can rotate them and see them, but they are just experiments.
They are not fonts and they are hard to use.
I wrote some Python scripts and I have come up with a way to use Hershey's data to build it into fonts.
You can see here, once you have figured out the structure,
it's very easy to figure out all the characters that he made.
This next page takes a while to load.
Here we go.
He didn't only design letters.
He also designed meteorological characters and astronomy, music, Cyrillic, Greek.
Not every typeface has that today.
What I have today is real usable OTS with proper Unicode character encoding, including Japanese.
The only downside is that you need to use a stroke around the characters to actually make them show up,
because they have zero stem width, but if you know that, it's easy.
However, if you don't know that, you are confused and you will see empty fonts, while they are in fact not empty.
What I want is more time.
I want to write a script that automatically creates variants with different outline thicknesses.
I generate one with SC4020 and SC4060 outline, and I want to release everything on GitHub.
I promised in the previous talk that this would be up soon.
I still have to promise that.
Now, I also promise it won't take long, because I'm actually pretty far along.
I think the gist, and since this talk is for the students, I made the gist for the students.
The most obscure projects can serve as a type design inspiration.
If we look again at Minotaur, we can see that when we fill in Hershey a little bit more, it's actually not that far away.
However, Sombatist went ahead and created different weights, and he created an italic,
and he also created something called Minotaur beef, which is totally out of the scope of the original Hershey fonts,
but still was inspired, and I think it's just a great and amazing project.
So, I want to dedicate this talk to Dr. Ellen V. Hershey.
V is for Vincent, by the way, pioneer of digital type, and because I don't want to end this on a sad note,
I have here another photo of his official retirement ceremony in 1979.
Thank you.
Thank you.
