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Re: [groff] How does one recreate the \(bs symbol?


From: Tadziu Hoffmann
Subject: Re: [groff] How does one recreate the \(bs symbol?
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 01:39:25 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30)

> Back in the day (read "the 1970s")  \(bs  was the "Bell System" logo.
> It was a glyph in the Symbol font.  And it looked like:
>
>       
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Bell_System_hires_1969_logo_blue.svg
>
> Is there a way to turn that into a glyph in a groff font?

If you're looking for the old "bell" logo, then that's already
been done.  Here's a paper by Bagley, Brailsford, and Kernighan
entitled "Digital restoration and typesetter forensics",
in which they report on doing this (among other things):

  https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42505604.pdf

It contains the following remark:

  From the earliest years of the second-generation CAT
  typesetter, Bell Labs always made sure that the Bell
  System logo was present within its Special Font, which
  consisted of mathematical and other symbols. UNIX users
  outside of Bell Labs just had to accept that any callout of
  the Bell logo, via \(bs, would absolutely not deliver the
  Bell logo but, in all probability, something like <heartsymbol>.

Then they proceed to explain how they outline-traced a
sufficiently high-resolution image (found with Google) of the
original Bell logo and converted that into a font (attached).
The result is usable, but if you look at the positioning of
the control points you can see that it doesn't conform to
very high standards.


Attachment: BellLabs-Regular.pfa
Description: application/font-type1


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