BubbaK said:
I think the Hershey fonts are great, but you might be better off using standard Windows TrueType fonts.
I agree 100%. While the Hershey fonts do look good they're really a bit of a relic from an era that's pretty much past.
Some of you may have been around long enough to remember when virtually all Drawings were produced using pen plotters. The issue was that ALL items on a Drawing had to produced using a finite-width pen, including text. Granted, it was possible to plot a Drawing using multiple pens (some plotters could have as many as six or even eight different pens available during the production of a Drawing) so you could conceivably use a wider pen for text but it would still not look like a filled-font, just a sort of smudgy text.
So to address this, Dr. Allen V. Hershey, at the Naval Weapons Laboratory, developed a set of 'fonts' that now carry his name. They were developed specifically for use with pen plotters and in 1967, when Dr. Hershey did this work, that's all that there was. First he created a font that gave the appearance of a 'filled-font' by using multiple curve segments for each 'stroke' of a letter. Also, since in those days the movement of the pens were dependent on the order in which the curve elements were created so a second goal was to create a font that could be plotted with the minimum amount of movement by the pen. This may not seem like a big deal today but anyone who has actually watched a pen plotter run will appreciate what I've saying. In fact, I can recall back in the early 80's when the Unigraphics (what NX was called when it was originally developed) development team spent a fair amount of time redoing most of the original UG fonts (first developed in the early to mid 70's) so as to optimize the pen movements when plotting strings of text, and it really helped at the time. Now it is true that later, pen-movment optimization codes were developed which addressed this from a general overall point of view that optimized the pen movements across the entire Drawing sheet but until then, plotting text was always something that needed special attention in order to minimize plot times as much as possible. And Dr. Hershey was very cognizant of that and that was one of the motivations to create the fonts that he did where the result gave the appearance of being filled yet was still efficient when plotted. Note there other attempts had been made to give the appearance of a filled or 'printed' font, including the use of hatching but they were very inefficient when plotted using a pen and the results were not all that good, so the Hershey fonts were recognized as the best approach at the time, all things were considered, which is why we added to the suite of UG/NX Fonts prior to the when NX started to support standard 'filled-fonts'.
That being said, with the advent of ink-jet and electrostatic printer/plotter technology, these efficiency issues were no longer relevant. And this then opened the way for having proper filled-fonts with the introduction of TrueType and OpenType technology, which are now supported by virtually all applications where strings of text needs to be rendered.
Anyway, sorry for the 'history lesson' but I think the story of Dr. Hershey and his work is interesting and it also goes back far enough that it reminds use that some of these issues are much older than we often realize.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
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