[RTTY] Fonts, mostly off topic

[Kok Chen]

On Jul 17, 2011, at 1:18 PM, iw1ayd wrote:

> Monaco on several M*S W*S PC's here around.

Monaco is an old typeface that debut on the first Macintosh in 1984.

The original Macintosh came with a bunch of fonts that were named after cities.  There were Geneva, Chicago, New York, etc. 

In about 1987, Apple developed TrueType and converted the old bitmapped fonts to scalable Truetype.  Subsequently, Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft, which has become the resident font technology today in Windows.  So I am not surprised that many of the TrueType fonts are usable on both Windows and Mac OS.  At least, the format conversion should be relatively easy.

The Chicago font was used even quite recently, like on the third generation iPod.  Monaco is still a defacto "standard" fixed width font on Macintoshes today.

Chuck Bigelow did the bitmap to TrueType conversion for Monaco and you can read about the effort here: 

http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume4/issue3/ep050cb.pdf

In the above article, he mentioned:

> The zero has a diagonal slash through the centre, which effectively differentiates it from
> the capital ‘O’ in a manner common in older terminals, but the zero slash does not protrude
> from the body of the letter, which distinguishes zero from O-slash.

As you can see, there was a conscious effort to make zero distinguishable not just from "oscar" but also from the Scandinavian slashed-O.

Bigelow received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award for his font work back in the mid-1980s and he is the original designer of the Lucida family of fonts; first used by the Scientific American periodical.  Today, Lucida Grande is the Macintosh system font.

73
Chen, W7AY