Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Very likely. For some background on the Hershey fonts, the tech stack where they were born, and mr. Hershey himself, there is this presentation by Frank Griesshammer: https://vimeo.com/178015110 .

Nice work! If I recall correctly, I used these when I was studying C in high school.

I’m sad to see graphics.h is still used in Pakistan, India and Brazil.

That's sad because its antiquated and means folks are still using DOS?

That's sad because it means there was no evolution in the last 20 years. People learn something, teach it and it gets frozen. Nothing new is learnt for decades.

It's weird there is someone still teaching using Borland C ... that is early 1990 stuff... and using DOS! That's closer to 30 years! It must be a cost thing.

I don't think it is a matter of cost. I think it is a matter of what the teacher knows.

Just to be clear: I didn't say Borland C is still used in Brazil. But you still can find CS courses teaching graphics.h just the same way. Actually, if it is used just for demo purposes I'd see no problem, it is still somewhat adequate for the purpose. I doubt that, though.

Still using DOS is not sad. Writing this on my Windows 11.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com