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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

You sometimes see a person do some things with mf but these days most folks want vector output, not bitmaps.

Today, most of the use of these ideas is in drawing technical graphics. For instance, for his drawings Knuth uses MetaPost, which is very much like MetaFont but outputs vectors (there are some additions to take advantage of PostScript).

Another example of mp involves LuaTeX (briefly, TeX but where you can write in the scripting language Lua). The folks who have developed it have brought MetaPost in as a ready-made drawing library. See https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb29-3/tb93hagen-mplib.pdf for instance.

Finally, still another example of the use of these ideas is the stand alone graphics production program Asymptote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote_(vector_graphics_lan... which aims to lift to 3D the algorithms that Knuth put into MetaFont to make beautiful curves. (I use this system.)

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But the bitmaps can be of any resolution, can't they? Is there any really cogent reason to prefer vector output?

File size is one, since the output documents only hold the one font, whether it is for body text or section headers.

Another reason is magnify-ability, or zoom in-ability. Authors are annoyed when they produce a graphic, and then include it in a document, say expanded to 120% of its original size or shrunk to 75%, and it contains jaggie letters. Similarly, readers are annoyed to blow up a map and find that the town names are hard to read.

Still another is that one set of fonts will do for essentially all documents, so on your hard drive you don't need a set at 10 pts, another set at 11, etc. The space these take up is less of an issue than it used to be, but it is an administrative annoyance.

Another issue impacted me a lot since I put stuff up for download. You have to maintain a number of outputs for the dpi-ness of various output devices, so that people reading on a screen use a different output file than people using a printer. In addition, Knuth has settings called things like blacker to tune the output for the physical output device engine, so you may want to maintain output file versions tuned for a number of different vendor's devices. Besides, at some point printers just became vector devices.

Basically, the market has spoken.

Right, so: if one intends to sell a font, Metafont may not be a good idea, but if the purpose is to make a font for one's own use in book typography, and one is otherwise inclined to Metafont, then these concerns needn't stand in one's way.

And perhaps it would be possible to make a vector-outputting version, if this has already been done for MetaPost.

There is MetaType1 [0], which is MetaPost-based.

[0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/MetaType1

Sure, feel free.

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