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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

You also get to see how "real typefaces" are produced using Metafont (namely, doing outlines and then filling them), which may not be crystal clear when reading the Metafontbook alone.

(I also like the book for a much simpler reason: it got me my Knuth cheque)

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Does this have prose in addition to the source code; or can you get the same information from looking at the code distributed with texlive?

You're getting an introduction, including an explanation of the parameters: https://www.2uo.de/image2.jpeg

Then short prose every now and then: https://www.2uo.de/image1.jpeg

But it's mostly the listings you can see on CTAN, as well. I actually misremembered and thought there was more explanation in the book.

What's really nice is that all glyphs are shown on a grid, next to their programs:

https://www.2uo.de/image0.jpeg

Sounds like it may be worth buying. But I'll see how far I get with the Metafontbook first.

If you're interested in MF, Volume E is really not optional.

Volume D is the code, it’s interesting because the literate programming approach where the raw code is transformed into a fully typeset version for printing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Volume B is the code for TeX.

If you just want a quick rough idea of how the book (Volume E) is structured, you could look at the January 1980 report of the same name: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/80/780/CS... — think of it as a very early draft where a lot of details (both code and prose) have changed, and the scan online is awful (rotated and low-resolution and somehow actually introduces typos) — but the bulk of the book is like the bulk of this report (two-page spreads with a glyph's definition in code on the right, with the resulting output on the left).

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