Typography is shaped by the physical medium in which it is rendered. Clay tablets and styli gave rise to cuniform. The sinuous curves of serif typefaces were refined by carving letter shapes into stone.
When typography entered the digital age, font designers faced the challenge representing font glyphs by an array of pixels. At high resolutions, this was a relatively straightforward process. At low resolutions, however, representing the serpentine curves of typographic characters by a course grid of pixels was more challenging, requiring carefully-honed images to create characters that looked correct at small sizes.
In the mid-1980s, Adobe Systems’ PostScript Type 1 font format introduced on-the-fly rasterization of outline fonts using a breakthrough hinting technology to avoid digitization artifacts. But hand-crafted bitmapped images remained the standard way to render fonts on low resolution printers and video displays, requiring font designers to carefully work out how to arrange pixels to simulate the shape of the complex character forms.
This was not the first time designers confronted this challenge, however. Adherents of cross-stitch embroidery also wrestled with fitting font shapes to the cells of a fixed grid. An old book I discovered at a flea market, Alphabete für die Stickerin (“Alphabets for Embroiders”), contains sample alphabets rendered as bitmapped character shapes to be realized in thread.
The book is undated, but it was likely published in the late 19th or early 20th century, reflecting embroidery techniques of the Victorian and Edwardian eras — at the dawn of the nearly century-long quest to represent letter shapes through a fixed array of pixels.
A few samples from Alphabete für die Stickerin are below.
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