Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("coolbutuseless/hershey")

What’s in the box:

• hershey_raw: the original encoding for every glyph (See the vignette for how to parse).
• hershey: a data.frame of the vector strokes for every glyph.
• hershey_svg: a list of SVG paths for every glyph.

Vignettes

• Animated stroke rendering
• How to generate a sample sheet for a font
• Description of the raw Hershey font format
• Rendering a glyph to SVG
• Visualise stroke order

Glyph Representations

The following are examples of the representation of the letter A (glyph 34 in the rowmant font)

hershey %>% 
  filter(font == 'rowmant', char == 'A') %>%
  filter(stroke %in% 0:3)
# A tibble: 8 x 11
      x     y  left right width stroke   idx glyph font    ascii char 
  <int> <int> <int> <int> <int> <fct>  <int> <int> <chr>   <int> <chr>
1     0    12   -10    10    20 0          1    34 rowmant    65 A    
2    -7    -8   -10    10    20 0          2    34 rowmant    65 A    
3    -1     9   -10    10    20 1          3    34 rowmant    65 A    
4     5    -9   -10    10    20 1          4    34 rowmant    65 A    
5     0     9   -10    10    20 2          5    34 rowmant    65 A    
6     6    -9   -10    10    20 2          6    34 rowmant    65 A    
7     0    12   -10    10    20 3          7    34 rowmant    65 A    
8     7    -9   -10    10    20 3          8    34 rowmant    65 A    

hershey_raw$rowmant[[34]]
[1] " 3001 36H\\RFKZ RQIW[ RRIX[ RRFY[ RMUVU RI[O[ RT[[[ RKZJ[ RKZM[ RWZU[ RWYV[ RXYZ["

hershey_svg$rowmant[[34]]
[1] "M0-12L-7 8M-1-9L5 9M0-9L6 9M0-12L7 9M-5 3L4 3M-9 9L-3 9M2 9L9 9M-7 8L-8 9M-7 8L-5 9M5 8L3 9M5 7L4 9M6 7L8 9"

hershey %>% 
  filter(font == 'rowmant', char == 'A') %>%
  ggplot(aes(x, y, group = stroke)) + 
  geom_path() + 
  geom_point() + 
  coord_equal() + 
  theme_minimal() 

Font Sample Sheets

Font sample sheets show the representation of every glyph in a font. Click to view the sample sheets for every font in PDF format.

Example font: Cursive (click to reveal)

Example: All the ’A’s

glyph_df <- hershey %>% 
  filter(char == 'A') 
  
ggplot(glyph_df) + 
  geom_path(aes(x, y, group = stroke)) + 
  coord_equal() + 
  theme_void() + 
  facet_wrap(~font)

Example: Futura!

glyph_df <- hershey %>% 
  filter(font == 'futuram', glyph %in% c(32:46)) 
  
ggplot(glyph_df) + 
  geom_path(aes(x, y, group = stroke)) + 
  coord_equal() + 
  theme_void() + 
  facet_wrap(~glyph, labeller = label_both, ncol = 5)

Example: Render text string

The function create_string_df() will create a data.frame of all the characters in the given string. It will offset each character by the known widths of the preceding characters to create a well-spaced set of points.

string_df <- hershey::create_string_df(text = "#RStats", font = 'cursive')

ggplot(string_df, aes(x, y, group = interaction(char_idx, stroke))) +
  geom_path() +
  geom_point(size = 1) + 
  coord_equal() +
  theme_void()

Use Restrictions on Hershey Fonts

Totally free (except if you convert them to the proprietary US NTIS format)

    USE RESTRICTION:
    This distribution of the Hershey Fonts may be used by anyone for
    any purpose, commercial or otherwise, providing that:
        1. The following acknowledgements must be distributed with
            the font data:
            - The Hershey Fonts were originally created by Dr.
                A. V. Hershey while working at the U. S.
                National Bureau of Standards.
            - The format of the Font data in this distribution
                was originally created by
                    James Hurt
                    Cognition, Inc.
                    900 Technology Park Drive
                    Billerica, MA 01821
                    (mit-eddie!ci-dandelion!hurt)
        2. The font data in this distribution may be converted into
            any other format *EXCEPT* the format distributed by
            the U.S. NTIS (which organization holds the rights
            to the distribution and use of the font data in that
            particular format). Not that anybody would really
            *want* to use their format... each point is described
            in eight bytes as "xxx yyy:", where xxx and yyy are
            the coordinate values as ASCII numbers.