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Computer Modern and AMSFonts
in Type 1 (PostScript) Form

The Type 1 fonts are now part of the main AMSFonts distribution.


History

The AMSFonts distribution is composed of two parts: the Computer Modern (CM) fonts, and the original AMSFonts.

The CM fonts collection includes the 75 fonts described in Donald Knuth's Computer Modern Typefaces (Volume E of the Computers & Typesetting series) as well as the "line", "circle" and symbol fonts associated with LaTeX.

The AMSFonts collection includes Euler (designed by Hermann Zapf), "extra symbols" (created at AMS), and cyrillic fonts (created at the University of Washington).

The Type 1 versions of the CM fonts (1990) and AMSFonts (1992) were produced by Blue Sky Research of Portland, Oregon, and Y&Y, Inc., of Concord, Massachusetts, who published the fonts in conjunction with their commercial implementations of the TeX program.

Character outlines for the CM fonts were derived from high-resolution METAFONT-generated character bitmaps by the ScanLab application from Projective Solutions (Ian Morrison and Henry Pinkham), applied and corrected by Douglas Henderson of Blue Sky Research. The outlines for the AMS Euler fonts were derived algorithmically from METAFONT code using tools developed by Y&Y.

Character- and font-level hints were programmed using software from Y&Y, with extensive hand work by Blenda Horn. Font engineering, production, and packaging were by Douglas Henderson and Berthold Horn.

The CMMI* fonts were revised in 1996 to conform to Knuth's changes to the greek delta and arrow characters.

Originally, the Type 1 implementations of the Computer Modern and AMSFonts were distributed only by Blue Sky Research and Y&Y, Inc. In 1997, they were made freely available for general use through the cooperation of a consortium of scientific publishers with Blue Sky Research and Y&Y. Members of this consortium included:

  • Elsevier Science
  • IBM Corporation
  • Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
  • Springer-Verlag
  • American Mathematical Society (AMS)

In order to assure the authenticity of the fonts, copyright was assigned to the American Mathematical Society.

Version 3.0 of the Euler fonts was presented to Donald Knuth on his birthday, January 10, 2008. Hermann Zapf, the original designer, reshaped many of the glyphs previously distributed, with implementation and assistance from Hans Hagen, Taco Hoekwater, and Volker RW Schaa.

In the CM fonts, some shape changes made by Knuth in 1992 were not made to the Type 1 fonts until after the release of version 2.2. The CM Type 1 fonts were updated for version 3.0 so that all glyph shapes should match Knuth's "final" MF versions, including all changes listed in cm85.bug under the headings "Improvements made in January 1992" and "Changes made after the fourth printing (1993) of Volume E". Some of these updates were already made by Y&Y, whose license was transferred from Y&Y through TUG to the AMS; the remaining changes were made by AMS staff.

Effective with the AMSFonts 3.0 distribution, all Type 1 fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).