Moritz F. Fürst – Smalltalk Sort

2023-03-27 12:38:20

Screenshot of a Smalltalk-80 interface, with three white views open on a gray background — The Smalltalk-80 interface, this screenshot was taken utilizing Dan Banay’s implementation

Like so many, I’ve been fascinated by Smalltalk, significantly due to the imaginative and prescient of computing it represents.^{I’m additionally very keen on these early PARC GUIs and their aesthetic. After enjoying round with Smalltalk-80 lately, I wished to know extra about its typefaces and have variations of them for my very own use.}

The Typefaces of Smalltalk-80

Considerably mockingly, the fonts utilized in Smalltalk-80 (which was the “launch model”, the primary variant made accessible outdoors of PARC) had been a considerable regression from the bespoke designs and elaborate options the PARC Studying Analysis Group had happening for the Alto and earlier variations of Smalltalk. The Alto not solely supported raster/bitmap fonts, but in addition high-quality “spline fonts”, the place the define of a glyph form is represented with a sequence of curves: Primarily the ancestor of how we use fonts at the moment. PARC had constructed interactive font editors each for define (“Fred”) and raster (“PrePress”) sort.^{A number of Alto fonts had been proportionally-spaced, and included quite a few particular characters.}

Earlier variations of Smalltalk included a number of typefaces, maybe essentially the most memorably is Cream by Bob Flegal, based mostly on a design by Alan Kay.^{Cream later gained extra fame when Invoice Atkinson transformed it to the Lisagraf font format and it grew to become the first system font of the Macintosh. Apple’s Smalltalk implementation additionally used Cream:}

Screenshot of the Macintosh Smalltalk-80 interface, with three white views open on a gray background — Smalltalk-80 for the Macintosh, this screenshot was taken working the 0.3 Launch on System 6 within the Mini vMac emulator

For the Smalltalk-80 launch, these all had been axed. Alan Kay notes in The Early Historical past of Smalltalk:

Just a few modifications needed to be made to the NoteTaker Smalltalk-78 to make a releasable system. Maybe the change that was most ironic was to show the customized fonts that made Smalltalk extra readable (and had been a trademark of your entire PARC tradition) again into customary pedestrian ASCII characters. In accordance with Peter Deutsch this “met with heated opposition throughout the group on the time, however has turned out to be important for the acceptance of the system on the planet.”

The “heated opposition” of which Kay writes turns into extra comprehensible after we realise how the transfer again to ASCII was not a matter of typographic prospers of the interface. It straight impacted the Smalltalk language.^{What Kay glosses over right here as “extra readable” has nothing to do with a pleasant sort design. The customized fonts of the Alto had a perform. For instance, in Smalltalk-76, you’d copy a component from an array to a different like this:}

a • i ← b • i

Very elegant and visually expressive. With no particular characters accessible, the syntax needed to be modified. In Smalltalk-80, this assertion would ultimately appear to be this:

a at: i put: (b at: i)

Much less “readable” certainly.

I don’t but know why the sooner typeface designs weren’t stored with a lowered ASCII character set. The 4 easy fonts that shipped with Smalltalk-80 have generic names, maybe reflecting the group’s opinion on them: Sans-Serif10, Sans-Serif12, Serif10, and Serif12. All of them have common, italic and daring variants. The letters are proportional, not fixed-width:

I fairly like these pedestrian ASCII character glyphs, and I consider they should be transformed for up to date use. They in some way have a splendidly pleasant character.

Sadly, I couldn’t but discover out who truly designed them. My guess could be that they had been made by Robert Flegal as nicely (Please email me in case you have any info!)

Restoration

The challenge builds on Leah Neukirchen’s BDF release of the common weight of Sans-Serif10 in 2021. Leah was additionally variety to verify a hint of the glyphs to be extra sensible than making an attempt to decode no matter format these fonts are in within the Smalltalk-80 setting.

“Sans-Serif10” typed out for subsequent redrawing from the screenshot. Curiously, I additionally discovered two *ligatures* by chance. Whereas ‘fl’ doesn’t differ from merely printing the ‘f’ and ‘l’ characters after one another in Sans10, the ‘ffi’ is customized: the ‘f’ crossbars are related!

The glyph shapes and spacing widths had been reconstructed from the original Xerox virtual image tape shared by Mario Wolczko, utilizing the wonderful Smalltalk-80 implementation by Dan Banay. After consulting – what else – Adele Goldberg’s documentation to remind myself methods to change fonts within the editor, I sampled the typefaces.

The daring variant of “Sans-Serif10”, with a pixel overlay to reconstruct the glyph shapes and letter spacing

Ultimately, I hope to have time to revive all 4 of them, and in addition make prolonged character units accessible— This can be a work in progress.

You’ll be able to at present see some cuts of Sans10 in motion on my micro blog.

Downloads

Nota bene: I don’t have a Home windows system or a low-res show at hand for testing, and I’m not knowledgeable sort designer by any stretch of the creativeness. Please send me a report if the non-bitmap variations of those fonts don’t carry out as they need to.

License: Bitmapped (pixel) fonts, since they’re thought-about computerized representations of a typeface, are usually not copyrightable within the U.S. We are able to due to this fact take into account the Smalltalk-80 typefaces to be public area. The fonts made accessible listed here are beneath OFL.

Smalltalk Sans10

Smalltalk Sans10 is a trustworthy restoration of the “Sans-Serif10” 10px typeface. The character set covers the unique printable ASCII. In comparison with Leah’s BDF version of the regular weight, Smalltalk Sans10 Common differs in a couple of glyph shapes and spacings (most notably ‘P’ and ‘R’, that are 1px wider in her model than what I reconstructed from Smalltalk-80).

The downloads embrace the entire household.

Smalltalk Sans10 Prolonged

This model of Sans10 options an prolonged character set. I’ve tried my finest to match the fashion and spirit of the unique within the design of the extra glyphs. Prolonged helps ISO-Latin-1, plus a couple of additional characters (largely based mostly by myself wants). In Prolonged, the arrows that signify the circumflex and the underscore within the authentic character set have been moved to the arrows block (U+2191 and U+2190), changed by correct circumflex and underscore glyphs. The grave accent additionally has been changed, the glyph form has been moved to U+2018. Prolonged comes with particular glyphs: The caret (U+2038) is Smalltalk-80’s cursor, and the Personal Computer (U+1F4BB) is, in fact, the Alto.

I’m not totally pleased with all of the glyphs but, however you may already check drive the Common:

Here’s a desk of the included glyphs: