"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 16 Nov 2016 13:08:31 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
. ..
On Tue, 15 Nov 2016 22:23:30 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

I had the job of designing the fonts for an ink jet printer so
I've
..
Thankless job, wot? (more recently, anyway) I used to make web
advertising banners and sorted through the hundreds of different
fonts
available through Corel Draw 3 (my first graphical purchase) to
match
the font to the product and company it represented.

I toyed with a font editor a couple times but didn't have the
mindset
for it. You probably did it more from an electronics perspective,
so
I
can't really compare. Were you gifted with naming the font you
inspired, or did the company graciously call it "default inkjet
font
1"?

The dot pitch was 240 per inch, with the option of horizontally
shifting by 1/2 the pitch after a blank space, which helped to fake
Bezier curves and draw italics. The lawyers said we could copy
laserjet output as long as we renamed the font, since the alphabet
can't be copyrighted, so each was prefixed with the company name.

However laserjet printing is at 300DPI and is fuzzy with toner dust
around the edges,

They still have a lot of that fuzz today, but it's better.


so the engineer had custom-built a digitizing and
editing system based on an HP1000 minicomputer that only he and I
could operate.

Widely embraced, I see.


I had to completely redraw each letter to resemble the
blobby size and outline of each digitized character image in the
full
IBM sets of Courier, Bodoni, Times Roman etc, in several point sizes
of normal, bold and italic, plus fine-tune the character widths for
the proportional pitch fonts, then make test printouts and re-edit
to
account for the unique quirks of this ink-jet printer. I spent
nearly
a full year on that task before they were happy with the results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)

I would have gone absolutely bonkers after even a week of that...
Congrats on surviving it.

Actually I fell back on the hand lettering guideline rules I learned
in Drafting and created my own grids, since I couldn't imitate the
300DPI dot placement and they used a different set of tricks like a
tiny dot outside the curve to change its appearance. I had to account
for the molten ink dots wicking larger or running together before they
solidified.