The CMPICA family was created by Don Hosek in 1988 to fill a need for
a usable face for submitting fiction manuscripts to mainline
publishers. Changes to parameters were made to create a face with
roughly the same proportions as the Xerox Pica typeface available for
use on Xerox laser printers and some changes to encoding were added as
well so that TeX input conventions could be used to produce output
that matched standard typescript conventions. In short, `` and ''
become a straight double quote, ` and ' become a straight single
quote, --- becomes -- and -- becomes -. In addition, two auxiliary
fonts are provided: cmpicati underlines characters and cmpicab
underlines characters with a squiggly underline. Either of these fonts
may be used as a model of how to apply the same effect to other
MF-generated types.

A modified version of the original companion LaTeX [2.09] style can be
found floating around on the net if one looks hard. A companion math
face was proposed but never completed. It was envisioned to be a mix
of typewriter-style characters and hand-drawn letters to give the full
antediluvian effect.

Don Hosek
Quixote Digital Typography
dhosek@quixote.com
fax: 909-625-1342