
32 Years of Metafont [pdf] - taeric
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/MFtalk.pdf
======
deathanatos
These are the slides from a talk Knuth gave recently in San Francisco, at the
public library[1]. I attended (it was _FREE_!), and I thought it was quite
good — this was the first time I've ever seen Knuth in person, let alone a
lecture by him. As other comments note, the slides in isolation aren't really
that great; you really need the video. The talk was titled _Thirty Two Years
of Metafont_ , with a subtext of "Donald Knuth will reminisce and talk about
things he remembers." It was, in fact, his musings on Metafont, which I found
quiet interesting.

lifepillar helpfully found the video in another comment[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU)

One of my senior classes in college was Typography, the final project of which
was to author a font, A-Z a-z 0-9 and some punctuation. _That_ is a grueling
task, and I have a lot of respect now for the people who can do it and have
the result not look terrible (as mine did). In particular, in the talk, Knuth
notes the difficulty of the letter "S" — which nearly drove me insane trying
to render it as part of my final project, so I found it quite humorous that it
also gave him a bit of grief. It is a frustrating letter when you need to not
just write one, but accurately describe it to a computer.

[1]:
[http://coopertype.org/event/thirty_two_years_of_metafont](http://coopertype.org/event/thirty_two_years_of_metafont)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12587556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12587556)

~~~
taeric
Thanks to you and lifepillar for posting the video! I found the link to the
slides on his "news" page. I thought a few of the slides would help show, for
example, the level with which you could parameterize METAFONT fonts.

There was a story recently that was talking about parameterized web fonts, and
I found it interesting how few people realized you could do that with
METAFONT. I think quite a few people think of it as a bitmap format. I find it
to be more akin to svg.

The slides of Font Blvd are just plain fun. No surprise that he turned to
cataloging diamond signs later. :)

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TheRealPomax
I don't quite understand what can be gotten from these slides... There does
not appear to be any narrative, so without a "talk" to go with it this link
isn't very useful?

~~~
lifepillar
Here's the talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU)

~~~
Viper007Bond
This really should be the link instead of the PDF.

~~~
taeric
Agreed. I posted the slides since that link was on his site.

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Camillo
It's more like 8 years of Metafont, and 24 of its corpse clinging to TeX like
some sort of husk.

~~~
acqq
I believe it is still the best way for Knuth to fulfill his goals:

“Ever since those beginnings in 1977, the TeX research project that I embarked
on was driven by two major goals. The first goal was quality: we wanted to
produce documents that were not just nice, but actually the best. […] The
second major goal was archival: to create systems that would be independent of
changes in printing technology as much as possible. When the next generation
of printing devices came along, I wanted to be able to retain the same quality
already achieved, instead of having to solve all the problems anew. I wanted
to design something that would be still usable in 100 years.”

(from "Digital Typography" by Knuth)

~~~
nailer
I remember reading something like that - the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to
produce high quality typeset documents. Then when I actually used TeX (or
LaTeX or whatever the variant was at the time), metafont not only allowed, but
defaulted to bitmap fonts. :\

~~~
dubya
Metafont produces bitmap fonts, but the description is in vectors. You have to
remember that generating bitmaps from outlines takes a decent amount of
computing power, especially pre-1990, and caching the bitmaps is a reasonable
default.

~~~
jandrese
It was a reasonable default. These days it's far more suspect. TeX in general
has the feel of an application that's been stuck in the 80s for a long long
time.

~~~
dubya
The default now is that no one uses Metafont, so it doesn't really matter what
it outputs. AFAIK, (almost) no one outputs dvi files, or uses whatever the old
font choosing mechanism was, either. The Computer Modern fonts are still
pretty commonly used, and probably look somewhat dated, but it's not that
difficult to use other fonts, especially if you choose a TeX variant like
XeTeX.

I think Metafont tried to address a lot of things that were really only
interesting to type designers, who turn out to be largely allergic to
designing fonts in a text editor. Some of the ideas were revisited in the
Adobe Multiple Master fonts, now extinct, and I believe there's a new version
of (fonts with axes in addition to size).

------
mrcactu5
how hard is it to add a single letter to your font. say a triangle?

I suppose I could use a Delta, and get HΔPPY -- I guess that's how the t-shirt
was made.

in general, though -- is Metafont still the way we add new fonts to TeX these
days in 2016?

~~~
amyjess
> in general, though -- is Metafont still the way we add new fonts to TeX
> these days in 2016?

Nowadays, we have XeTeX, which allows for the use of any OpenType font. In
fact, for a long time XeTeX was the only non-Adobe product that could actually
make use of OpenType features. I have fond memories of playing around with
XeTeX in 2009-ish to show off all the really cool stuff my fonts could do.

