The Xerox Alto Font Design System

Abstract

This article is from a talk given at Stanford University in 1983 at a seminar for the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). It describes pioneering digital font software developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1974. Built for prototype personal workstations, the software uses mathematical curves called "splines" to define the outlines of letter shapes that are converted to bitmaps (pixel mosaics) for use on computer screens and digital printers. This spline-bitmap model is used today for the screens of nearly all computers, smart phones, ebooks, and other text displays. Previously unpublished, the manuscript appears here as digital font archaeology – a glimpse of concepts from four decades ago that became the technology of much that we read today. We are grateful to Patrick Baudelaire for permission to publish it as he wrote it in 1985 and to the Cary Graphic Arts Collection of Rochester Institute of Technology for providing scans of the original manuscript and images in its collection. Charles Bigelow