[Simh] Graphics Terminals and Graphic System Phototypesetters

[Paul Koning]

> On Dec 10, 2015, at 11:48 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Simulation of the output of early phototypesetters, or a Gerber photoplotter is a little tricky because you need the glyph information that was printed on the mechanism that shot the images of the characters onto the film output; which could be moved around in different slots depending on the job being typeset. Later units used high resolution CRT like things to form the characters.

Indeed.  For disk type phototypesetters, you'd have to tell the simulation machinery what font disk is loaded, so it would know the character repertoire and their codes, to generate equivalent PostScript or the like.  For CRT type phototypesetters, the character and font repertoire is generally fixed for a given installation, but it would vary from one installation to the next.  Customers would tell the manufacturers what fonts to include, and possibly special characters as well.  It's not like modern systems where you can count on Unicode (or even ASCII).

	paul