ong before PostScript or TrueType, before filled boundaries or even bitmaps, there was Dr. Allen V. Hershey and his vector fonts. Dr. Hershey, a mathematical physicist at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, was displeased with the ugly text that accompanied his graphs and diagrams, as printed by the computer controlled plotters of his time. His response was to create a system for storing a series of linear vectors, which when rendered according to his algorithm (implemented above in Java), produced reasonably good looking type, which was scalable and device independent.

That was the easy part.

He then proceded to digitize and encode thousands of characters in several occidental alphabets in a variety of styles, and an even greater number of oriental characters. These achieved "an esthetically pleasing and economically viable method of setting type for technical publications".

The above quote is taken from "Tables of Coordinates for Hershey's Repertory of Occidental Type Fonts and Graphic Symbols" published in April, 1976 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which went on to say, "For one man to achieve the digitizing of literally thousands of characters requires a large measure of motivation, industry and fortitude... an ambitious undertaking requiring a happy mixture of art and science, of alphabets and algorithms, of calligraphy and computing and of psychology and printing."

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