11 Feb
2021
11 Feb
'21
1:12 p.m.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html
On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 6:05 PM Andrew Hume <andrew(a)humeweb.com> wrote:
there was actually a weird fuss about the Merganthaler
typesetter.
Ken figured out how the fonts were encoded and so we had the raw outline
data for
all the fonts (they were gorgeous!). this enabled us to add in special
characters like
the peter weinberger face.
ken wanted to do the right thing and tried to license the fonts from
Merganthaler,
but we had endless discussions where Ken would say “we know how the fonts
are encoded,
can we license them?” and the sales person would say “no you can’t;
they’re secret”,
and so on. we’d even show them the peter face but to no avail. so we kinda
flew
under the radar for that (but we tried!).
the typesetter itself was entertaining; if i recall correctly, the
software ran on a 8in floppy
and Ken wrote a B compiler/run time system for the computer inside.
andrew