Mainframe laser printer font manager

The bank Jon worked for built numerous production systems using APL (a symbol based programming environment), but no legible APL printer fonts were available for the bank's IBM mainframe laser printer. As a side project, Jon invented an interactive full screen font manager that allowed retrieval, italicization, bolding and dynamically smoothed scaling to any printable size.

It was also necessary to create the font smoothing and shading algorithms and software that made it possible to enlarge any available font without introducing "aliasing" (screen jaggies / stair step patterns due to enlarged pixelated patterns).

The bank adopted the tool as standard. IBM adopted and shared the tool across multiple customers.


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