AMS Euler is an upright cursive

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

, commissioned by the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

(AMS) and designed and created by

Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include ...

with the assistance of

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of comp ...

and his Stanford graduate students. It tries to emulate a mathematician's style of handwriting mathematical entities on a blackboard, which is upright rather than italic. It blends very well with other typefaces made by

, such as Palatino, Aldus and Melior, but very badly with the default

TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...

font

Computer Modern Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern and its variants remain very widely used in ...

. All the alphabets were implemented with the computer-assisted design system

Metafont Metafont is a page description language, description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter (computer software), interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into ...

developed by Knuth. Zapf designed and drew the Euler alphabets in 1980–81 and provided critique and advice of digital proofs in 1983 and later. The typeface family is copyright by American Mathematical Society, 1983. Euler

development was done by Stanford computer science and/or digital typography students; first

Scott Kim Scott Kim is an American puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author of Korean people, Korean descent. He started writing an occasional "Boggler" column for ''Discover (magazine), Discover'' magazine in 1990, and became an exclusive column ...

, then Carol Twombly and Daniel Mills, and finally David Siegel, all assisted by John Hobby. Siegel finished the Metafont Euler digitization project as his M.S. thesis in 1985. The AMS Euler typeface is named after

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( ; ; ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss polymath who was active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician, geographer, and engineer. He founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made influential ...

. First implemented in

METAFONT Metafont is a page description language, description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter (computer software), interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into ...

, AMS Euler was first used in the book '' Concrete Mathematics'', which was co-authored by Knuth and dedicated to Euler.
This volume also saw the debut of Knuth's Concrete Roman font, designed to complement AMS Euler. The Euler Metafont format fonts were converted to PostScript Type 1 font format by the efforts of several people, including Berthold Horn at Y&Y, Barry Smith at Bluesky Research, and Henry Pinkham and Ian Morrison at Projective Solutions. It is now also available in

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

format.

Reshaping Euler

In 2009, AMS released version 3.0 of AMS fonts, in which

reshaped many of the Euler glyphs, with implementation and assistance from Hans Hagen, Taco Hoekwater, and Volker RW Schaa. The updated version 3.0 was presented to Donald Knuth on his birthday, January 10, 2008. These updates were designed to work with the metrics for version 2.2, so no changes to the .tfm files were needed. Since the updates were made directly to the Type 1 files, the (incompatible)

sources have been removed from the distribution.AMSFonts README file
/ref> The reshaped version has been released under the OFL. Neo Euler is largely based on the above, but with

OpenType math OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporat ...

features added.

References

External links

AMSFonts
*
User's Guide to AMSFonts
', version 2.2d January 2002, PDF document, 34 pages, file size: about 660 kB, which includes a section on the history of AMS Euler fonts. * See als
video recording of presentation at TUG 2008
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ams Euler Linotype typefaces Script typefaces TeX Typefaces designed by Hermann Zapf Typefaces designed by Donald Knuth Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1983