Script to map A. V. Hershey's vector fonts to TrueType

These fonts were originally created by Dr. A. V. Hershey in the 60s, while working at the U. S. National Bureau of Standards. They were designed to be used in vector-based computer displays and printers. They are very advanced for the time, with thousands of glyphs that include special characters, mathematical symbols, musical symbols and more. Not only that, they are beautiful and have per-character side bearings. There's even a script font with ligatures!

The original files are available here: http://cd.textfiles.com/sourcecode/usenet/compsrcs/unix/volume04/hershey/

This is a script that directly converts the original data from the Usenet Font Consortium into almost-usable TrueType fonts. Mapping all original glyphs to Unicode is out of scope. Creating diacritics is out of scope.

Run main.py with the appropriate arguments to generate the SVGs and the TTFs. You need FontForge installed in your machine to build the TTFs. You can get it here: https://fontforge.org

• svg - Generates the SVG files.
• ttf - Generates the TTF files. It is necessary to generate the SVGs first.
• svg ttf - Generate the SVG and TTF files all at once.
• single-process - Deactivates parallel font generation. Can be useful for debugging.

The script uses the .hmp files to map the glyphs to ASCII. Unfortunately, since the .hmp files long predate the creation of Unicode, they don't quite map correctly to Unicode. Some manual adjustments are needed to get the TTFs to an usable state. All the glyphs that are not covered by the .hmp files are grouped in the Unknown_X.ttf files.

The original files from Usenet are included in the modsources folder. Consider reading the README file.