In the composition of a character, the ordering and the direction of vectors are immaterial for any cathode ray printer which is correctly adjusted. In order to minimize chaos in the sequence of vectors, the vertical strokes are recorded first and the horizontal strokes are recorded last. Directions are consistently from left to right and from top to bottom. This conforms more or less to the stroke sequence for hand drawn letters. A different sequence might improve the efficiency of a mechanical plotter by a reduction of the amount of motion in a pen up status.
The traditional origin of coordinates for digitalization would be on the base line of the character and at the left edge of the character block. The origin of coordinates for the alphabets at the Bell Telephone Laboratories is situated in the upper left corner of the character block. The origin of coordinates for the characters at the Naval Weapons Laboratory is situated centrally in the interior of the character. This simplifies the centering of isolated characters in cartographic applications and provides a common center line for mixtures[n 1] of fonts. Otherwise the origin is arbitrary and the data maybe referred to any other origin by a relatively simple subroutine. The digital data for each character are recorded in a separate block on tape. Each block consists of 16 decimal digit words. Each word is divided into four fields of four digits each. The first word. is a beginning-of-block word and the last word is an end-of-block word. Each field of digital data is divided into two digit pairs. The first digit pair of the first field gives the left edge of the character block. The second digit pair of the first field gives the right edge of the character block. Each of the remaining fields give coordinates of a point. The first digit pair gives the X-coordinate and the second digit pair gives the Y-coordinate of the point.
- ↑ Examples of mixtures include large parentheses around built up fractions or Roman symbols in a Japanese text.
25
