

The Art of Computer Typography - wlll
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3183-the-art-of-computer-typography

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jgrahamc
This blog post is pretty light. If you really care about Knuth's work on
METAFONT then you should just read the source code. It's written using WEB:
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/systems/knuth/dist/mf/mf.web>

WEB is a language created by Knuth that supports his notion of literate
programming.

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sunkencity
Re literate programming. A scientist friend of mine likes to build his
articles so that the graphs in a TeX are generated from an R script. Makes it
easy to change some variables or try different input. sweave is another
solution <http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch/Sweave/>

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sp332
Here's a little video (and transcript) of Knuth describing how hard it is to
make a general system for describing type:
<http://www.webofstories.com/play/17114> My favorite part is when he's
fighting with generalizing the 'S' and his wife suggests, "Well why don't you
just make it S-shaped?"

~~~
mdaniel
I hope his classroom lectures don't have that same meter; it is very
distracting. I'm probably going to hell for blaspheming against Knuth.

That said, thank you for posting the link - that site looks very interesting.

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epsil
For the Tolkien fans, Johan Winge's Tengwar Annatar font was created with
METAFONT, mftrace (using potrace) and FontForge. The design is meant to
simulate a nib pen, and METAFONT is particularly apt at producing calligraphic
letter shapes.

<http://home.student.uu.se/jowi4905/fonts/annatar.html>

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sunkencity
Interesting! I use (La)TeX but I didn't know what metafont was about.

Even though I am pretty good at identifying typefaces I have forever damaged
my changes of identifying the standard mac fonts like Palatino, Times,
Helvetica in print. Rendered as bitmap (like on a 9" Macintosh Plus) I have no
problem in telling them apart.

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ralph
If anyone's not sure of the advantages of a text processor, like TeX or troff,
over a WYSIWYG (or WYSI-all-YG, as Kernighan said) application, then
<http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-02.html> may help.

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TwoBit
TeX is great but in serious need of a rewrite. I'm not sure it will ever
happen.

