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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Metafont is a really nice program for designing typefaces. There are two stand-out features:

(1) You specify control points on the outline, not outside (as with Bezier curves). That's something Peter Karow already did with Ikarus, but it didn't prevail.

(2) You write programs. Obviously that was a non-starter for the type-designer profession, which is much more programming friendly today, but back then it wasn't.

Oh, and read up on the "hinting" mechanisms in Metafont, it's lightyears ahead of Type 1 hints and TrueType instructions.

Obviously, today it's long in the tooth: 128 glyphs are way to few, the fact that it creates bitmap fonts is en vogue, either.

Still, a fantastic tool from which you can still learn a lot.

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> Obviously, today it's long in the tooth: 128 glyphs are way to few, the fact that it creates bitmap fonts is en vogue, either.

To be fair, the language Metafont defines the font in vector format, but computers at the time weren't fast enough to interpret metafont on the fly generating the fonts, so in all metafont software until today there is this preprocessing part where you generate bitmap fonts.

I wonder if Metafont could be used today with new software which interprets Metafont code generating fonts on the fly. I read the Metafont book and all the programming capabilities appear very powerful and useful. Perhaps we could create fonts where there is variation each time a letter is printed, logos and symbols with more interactive behavior when it's compressed or stretched out...

Metafont's "charext" feature allows for more than 128 glyphs, though it's kind of a cheat, as it puts artificial constraints on character dimensions. But it would be much less trouble to modify Metafont to properly handle larger character sets than it was to get TeX to.

Concerning bitmaps, it's ironic that window systems ultimately display bitmaps on the screen, yet they keep the pathway from font-outline to their character-bitmap cache internal. There's no way to tell MacOS, for instance, that you want to plug in your own provider, that it can call whenever it first wants the bitmap for a given font glyph at a given size. Too bad this API is hidden; it must exist internally in MacOS, Windows, etc.

IIRC, MF 2.0 at least boosted 128 to 256. At the time, the only character sets which went beyond 256 characters were CJK character sets which had uniform character dimensions for all characters so the limitation was not a problem.

You're absolutely correct; I should have said "more than 256". It's difficult to modify TeX to handle larger character sets, but Metafont could, using that weird hack that all characters of a given "mod 256" had to have the same dimensions (no doubt simply due to the limitations of TFM format).

> "Metafont is a really nice program for designing typefaces."

It is really a nice approach, not only for typefaces but also for graphics in general there is the Metafont inspired MetaPost. [1]

> "You specify control points on the outline, not outside (as with Bezier curves)."

Metafont basically simulates tools like brush and broad nib pen. This is great for some typefaces but it surprisingly gets in the way for most punchcutting based typefaces. The shapes of most of these letters are just not easy to replicate with a brush or pen approach.

[1] Metafont minuscule f, MetaPost majuscule P, not a typo.

While it can be used to simulate nib and brush characters, it's not required. Most of the CM typefaces do not use that functionality (only the calligraphic uppercase letters, designed by Neenie Billawalla, use the nib feature).

I know and as far as I remember this is done using a small brush to trace the outline and then fill it. Apart from being kind of a hack you also lose the beauty and simplicity of using Metafont to describe the spine of the character and let it derive the outline from that. I always thought of that as the higher abstraction that is preferable to use, but unfortunately and unexpectedly it falls short on many common character shapes. As a bezier outline description tool I see little benefit in using Metafont.

Surely, the 128-glyph limit is no real obstacle? Just make more fonts. Or convert to another format after designing in Metafont.

You're right, and I think that's what these newfangled LaTeX font schemes did (back when anybody still used bitmap fonts), but unfortunately I don't know much about it.

The LaTeX font schemes were more about providing a parameterized access to font families. TeX 3.0 provided access to 8-bit input and output.

I was involved in a typesetting project in the 90s where I wrote a preprocessor which took 16-bit input (encoded using SJIS—Unicode was not yet widely adopted enough to be practical) and turned that into a stream of TeX code which handled font selection and character coding. It also handled allowing breaks between Kanji/Kana characters at allowable points (e.g., between two Kanji/Kana but not between Kanji/Kana and, say, a period).

There were some specialized extensions of TeX that were designed for CJK typesetting. With the rise of Unicode, this functionality became available in XeTeX.

I may be misremembering this, but I think that Metafont 2.0 removed the 128 character limit.

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