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Comment by marcodiego

4 years ago

Those who remember old Borland’s graphics.h, remember it came with an interesting set of fonts. Those were born in the 50’s and are known as “Hershey fonts”.

There is a modern implementation compatible with the old Borland fonts: http://libxbgi.sourceforge.net/

Disclaimer: I implemented it.

Watching bgidemo.c running correctly on a modern machine is indescribably cool.

Inkscape supports converting text to a variety of stroke fonts: Extensions → Text → Hershey Text.

The fonts are SVG, stored in /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/svg_fonts/ under Linux.

I recently took EMS Readability from there and adopted it into a code base that is generating reMarkable documents with strokes and all (rather than PDFs) in support of reverse-engineering actually good rendering, as I wanted text in my generated documents.

I’ve seen some references to Hersey fonts in OpenCV’s text rendering. I wonder if those are from the same lineage.