32 Years of Metafont [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

32 Years of Metafont [pdf]

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

96 pointstaeric19 comments

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

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

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

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. :)

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?

Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU

This really should be the link instead of the PDF.

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

I thought you must not have been very charitable, as usually slide decks are easy to follow. I was wrong.

To anyone who didn't click: imagine 6 slides that show stroke by stroke how a character is built up - and then another 6 slides, and then a change in topics all without comment: yes, it's frustrating and I didn't really get much out of it. (there are random pages from the appendix of a book on fonts, historical pictures that clearly are part of a talk but without the talk, etc etc.)

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

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)

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. :\

All fonts are bitmap in the end (in typical printers or screens), because putting ink or darkening a pixel is a "bit" (on or off). What Metafont is doing is converting the glyph description (expressed with curves, etc.) to a bitmap optimized for a specific output device. Therefore the rasterization is not happening on the printer but on a different computer.

This has nothing to do with low quality (as you seem to imply) and can probably lead to even better results.

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.

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.

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).

The "core" of TeX (actually the only thing that should be called "TeX", the part that Knuth developed and maintains) is so by design decision (his initial decision, that I quoted). What's today used by the other as "TeX" is actually some independently maintained collection around of that core (a "distribution" like TeX Live or MikTeX) and it can and is intentionally "adapted" to the more modern times by its maintainers.

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/167470/how-to-follow-...

Knuth's paraphrased license: "it can be used freely, modified to suit one's needs, but -- if changed -- given a new name." ... "the reason for the name change request/requirement is practical -- to avoid the confusion"

Then, once Knuth decided his TeX is stable enough, he even introduced the version numbering system that would make quite obvious his decision that the changes should happen almost never (the version number length increases with every change, making it always harder for everybody to refer to the newer version if it happens):

"Since version 3 (released 1989) TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.14159265; it was last updated 2014-01-12."

An answer on the StackOverflow discussing the possibility of TeX successor, from 2008:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303877/is-a-successor-for...

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?

> 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.

Not many fonts are created with Metafont. People prefer to draw characters by hand instead of programming a pen to draw them. Anyway, nowadays you can use TeX (pdfTeX or XeTeX) with almost any font existing on your system.

Unless you're Knuth and only want to print your own books, you should probably use TTF and variants.

Counterexamples are welcome.

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