A Note on the Type (on Knuth's MetaFont)

Dexter Sinister is a cool artist collective whose work I have enjoyed since learning of them when they visited Vancouver a couple of years ago.

If you're not up to reading the whole essay, it's sill worth it to scan down the PDF and see how the same font is represented differently depending on the how the initial variables are set. This gave me a better intuitive appreciation for how metafont works, and what makes it different from other font specifications, than anything else I've read on the subject.

I found it very hard to read this. The whole time my brain kept getting distracted by how bad the fonts look.

It's great to see Metafont put to use these days, while a wonderful concept, seems like it fell into the margins of adoption and use with the prominance of bitmap and later vector outline computer font standards.

is the metafont source downloadable?