 Hello everybody, my name is Frank Grissomar, I'm very glad to be here. As Christopher already said, I spoke about a relatively obscure topic in Portland as well about box drawing characters, and this is in a way very similar. I don't always work with those things, but for some reason, for TypeCon, it seems to work out. So I'm going to talk about the Hershey fonts, and before you ask me what the Hershey fonts are, I want to tell you about how I discovered them. We need to go back in time for that. We need to go back to 2014, and as you all do, I buy fonts, and one of the fonts I bought in 2014 was Minotaur by production type. I like Minotaur immediately for its style. It looks very idiosyncratic. I liked that it includes a full set of Lombardic capitals, which not every font has. And I also liked that it's drawn entirely from straight lines, which I thought was quaint and interesting. So maybe you've heard about this website, it's called Typografica. One of the nicest things on Typografica is the yearly review of good typefaces. And for me, it was clear that I would review Minotaur. And I really didn't know much about Minotaur. I didn't know much about the design. I didn't know much about where it actually came from. I thought it was just an idea of the designer, Jean-Baptiste Levé. But when I did my research, I went into probably the deepest rabbit hole of research I've ever been in. And I started my research in the type specimen, of course. And apart from some type specimen, typical fluff, there is this sentence that references AV Hershey's series for early vector-based computing. And that sounds very interesting to me. I was wondering, early vector-based computing, what is that? Are there people working on room-sized computers on very old systems? I was thinking of cold war scenarios and blast-proof shelters. And what I found out is that Hershey was a mathematical physicist and he was working for the Navy at the Naval Weapons Laboratory in Virginia, which had the world's most advanced computers at that time. So here you see the world's most advanced computer. In fact, this was exactly the image I was envisioning, and this was the computer at Hershey was working on. Here you see an operator, probably not Hershey, checking her Facebook status or something. This computer is called N-O-R-C. And here you see a couple of people working on N-O-R-C. I wish computers today had those labels, it's pretty cool. There are no photos existing of Hershey, so I like to imagine he's one of them here, maybe him. So what were people doing on this N-O-R-C? Of course, they were doing high-performance computing, but what was the most important thing about this N-O-R-C machine was the ultra-high-speed optical printer. The printer in those days looked like this. It's a General Dynamics SC4020. General Dynamics is known not only for making printers, but they also make like fighter jets and war machinery and stuff like that. This was really the heart of the computer, and in order to make you understand what the printer did, I want to show you a little video. This is like three minutes long. General Dynamics Electron uses a device called the Charatron-shaped beam tube. It uses the electron in a manner different from other cathode-ray tubes. In the Charatron tube, electrons from the cathode are focused into a beam and accelerated by a tubular element called an electron gun. The beam is aimed by a selection plate at a particular spot on the tube matrix. The matrix of the tube is a stencil of 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 Charatron-shaped beam tube can be much more complex than those generated by other methods. A leading research laboratory uses the SC4020 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 our computer process on the ground, and an input tape for the SC4020 is prepared. The digitized picture of the moon's surface is recorded by overlaying the Charatron-tube face with blocked up. Satellite orbits are drawn from the ephemera's information. These drawings in spherical force can be prepared rapidly with updated tracking information. These, then, are a few of the applications of the SC4020. Curve plotting, printing, toolpath plotting, mapping, and many other results of calculation. No other proven computer output device matches this versatility in speed. The effective uses of the SC4020 are limited only by the ingenuity of the user. In the SC4020, man has a device to make marks with speeds never possible before. This device has all the versatility of man's own hands. It lets man make his mark with unprecedented creativity. The SC4020 is a product of general dynamics electronics. So, this printer was really a breakthrough. I found this sheet, this leaflet of advertisement on some kind of like eBay-like website, a very terrible resolution, but I copied the text and it explains clearly what such an old computer meant. I'm not gonna read all this text, but I'm just gonna emphasize a few things. The computer printer generated only row after row of numbers and symbols. And I think two years ago, Jeff Callum had a presentation about this at TypeCon. A big printer would print numbers and symbols like a typewriter basically, mechanically. An army of draftsmen and clerks converted the figures into charts, graphs, and drawings. So, those numbers needed to be converted manually into something readable and understandable. Transforming numbers into picture form that everybody can understand and use, that is the job of the SC4020 printer. And when I say printer, it is not like a laser chat of these days. It makes prints on microfilm or paper and up to 15,000 vectors per second, a vector is like a straight line. So, this microfilm printer does work of 25 men at half the cost. Those guys here are laid off, of course, but it's all for their bombs, but it's all for the sake of progress, so that's good, I guess. And the SC4020 really was a milestone. It made computer-generated graphics possible for the very first time. It created stuff like this for chemical formulas. It created very complex diagrams. I don't even know what that's supposed to be. Maybe a flow diagram. And, of course, it was also used for fun. This seems to be from the exact laboratory that Hershey worked in. And Hershey probably thought, well, if this printer can produce all those diagrams very quickly, it can certainly produce a diagram like this or it can produce a more complex diagram like this in a bit longer time. And then it can also produce a diagram like this here and finally a diagram like that here. And as you might have noticed, those are all capital Xs. So Hershey basically hacked the diagram generating functions of this printer to print letters. He wrote a paper called Calligraphy for Computers that came out in 1969. And in this paper, he described the designs of various characters. And Hershey was very prolific in designing characters. He designed here a Latin alphabet and Greek because he was a mathematician. It was kind of understandable. But he also created like a very beautiful script. He created cartographic symbols. I love the tree here. I think it's still, those still all exist as emoji today, I think. And he would also create real typographical solutions. Like he created letters with contrasts. He created ligatures. He created like signs for alchemy and so did science. He created variants of typefaces, black letter and he created Japanese characters as well. And he also created optical sizes. The optical sizes are not called as today's subhead and texts, but they're called Fortran, which was for the small Fortran formulas. Cartographic, which was for use in maps. Indexical and principle was for use in documents and triplex was probably like a display use. There are styles, which are different by the number of parallel lines they use. The simplex line is basically a monolinear simple line. Duplex uses two parallel lines in both horizontal and vertical direction. Complex is basically like a modern phase with straight contrast and triplex is the most decorated of the four. So, Hershey fonts are basically collections of characters which are composed of line segments. There are 14 styles of Hershey fonts, around 1500 Western characters and 800 Japanese characters. So he was very prolific in creating those. And it is noticeable that for those early computer fonts, the fonts are relatively good. And I think he was so good because he really used stuff that was good to begin with. He used like old references for instance specimen books. He talked to calligraphers and he used the Leroy lettering set for the simplex styles. This is the Leroy lettering set. You could use the stencil here to create letters and then those are well known from comic books. And I would like to ask is Ellen Hershey the world's first digital type designer? I don't know, but it might very well be possible. What is definitely a fact is that Hershey facilitated what is now called as desktop publishing here without him stuff like this wouldn't have been possible. Like annotating a graph, mathematical formulas, printer on paper or just normal type setting. This was something totally novel in the time that you could print out something like this from a computer. And here's again a rundown of the styles that he created, simplex, duplex and complex. For Hershey, complex script has a different meaning than it does today for type designers. But I think that's pretty fun. So what's the status of Hershey fonts today? They are in the public domain for quite a while and when you research Hershey fonts you usually land in very nerdy computer geek forums. They are stored in an off-putting data structure and they're usually not outline fonts. So this is what you find when you look for Hershey fonts. This is how they are stored. Those lines are characters. And when I first saw it I was like, what is this? I don't understand anything. But it's actually quite simple to understand if you know how to divide the characters. So you know that the first couple of numbers just denote the character index and the number of movements within that character. Space r always means the start of a new segment. Numbers r, for whatever reason, always calculators offsets from the index of letter r. Every letter in the alphabet has an index. The index of r is 82. So if MTWT is given, it comes out to coordinates five, minus two, minus five, minus two. I think this just saves data storage. So to bring this character to make it a bit clearer, the character code is 501. The number of commands within that character are nine. The side bearings are refined in three segments. And what we end up with is a capital letter a made out of three individual lines where the yellow lines are zero. And there are many computer programs and that's what I mean with nerdy stuff that are just concerned with solving that problem. That is the result of their work. And I'm not really satisfied with that because it's no real fonts. There is no Unicode in the fonts and therefore no font. Some are PostScript fonts but they have really bad encoding. So I wrote a small script that would create a UFOs from the Hershey font file. So this is a screenshot from RoboFont where I have like the R for Hershey triplex Roman. And I didn't only do this for one character but for all Hershey characters. So you can see here, those are all fonts and those fonts are kind of special because they are zero width just outlined in InDesign. This is the continuation of those fonts. You see the musical symbols here. And you see Cyrillic here as well. And you see black letter. And here you see the Lombardic caps. And there, for the first time I understood that Jean-Baptiste included those Lombardic caps as a nod to Hershey which I think is very nice. It's not just a hipster decision, it's really founded in history. And what Hershey also did, which is a crazy endeavor for the time, he encoded Japanese glyphs, a portion of Kana, Hiragana and Katakana. And what I did with all this data I made real OTF fonts, I assigned Unicode to all of them, including the Japanese glyphs. And therefore I can have made this presentation have lots of fun. The font files are quite special. This here are the font files that you can see in the finder and you see there is nothing there because the outlines are zero width. The Cyrillic ones and Greek ones, they don't show anything because they don't start with A. I think they could be folded together. So this project is still ongoing. And what I still have to do is I want to create like a filled in version, not just a zero width version and I need to solve some math for that. I want to automatically write some variants, oh there's a typo, with different outline thicknesses and I want to release that whole stuff on GitHub. And it is going to be in the Adobe fonts GitHub repository, hopefully very soon. And if we look back at Minotaur and compare it with Hershey Triplex here, we pump up the line a little bit. We can see it's really very similar, but it's also a departure. Of course the terrible spacing has been fixed and Minotaur goes out to different weights that Hershey doesn't have different styles and to totally different ideas based on the original concept. And I think it's nice to see that such a late historical idea can lead to something entirely new. We bought beer here in Denver and I found this in the fridge, I didn't buy this on purpose, but I noticed that this tea here is all jaggy and it looks suspiciously like this Hershey Blackletter font. I have really no clue where it comes from, so maybe somebody knows who designed that label. It's really curious. And I want to dedicate this presentation to Ellen Vincent Hershey. You can find barely anything about him on the web. His Wikipedia page barely exists, there are no photos of him and it was really hard even to find his birth date and his when he died. But what I found is very probably his daughter who is active on Flickr and I think I will get in touch with her, maybe I can get a photo of him and put it up on Wikipedia. And that is the end of my presentation. I want to thank you all very much. I want to thank Jean-Baptiste Levee for discovering Hershey and for making me aware of Hershey. I want to thank Ken Landy and Dirk Meyer who helped me with finding unique codes for Japanese characters. And I work for Adobe. Thank you very much.