Fonts & Encodings

Appendix F. METAFONT and Its Derivatives

Donald Knuth is an incurable perfectionist. He considered the issue of fonts when he decided to create a programming language for typesetting his books on programming. While he was at it, he decided to resolve the question of fonts once and for all by creating the ultimate programming language for creating all possible and imaginable fonts in the same logical, efficient way.

That was 1979. The programming language in question is METAFONT. In 1983, a second version of the software was released to improve the language. That is the version that we use today.

In the same year, 1983, John Warnock of Adobe was working on the PostScript language. That language was the ideal complement to T_EX, since a DVI file produced by T_EX could then be very profitably converted to PostScript. But the PostScript language, and even more the PDF format, signed the death warrant for METAFONT, at least in its current form.

Knuth's philosophy was to say that the rendering of glyphs was best handled by the central processing unit, since it could interpret the METAFONT language and construct perfect glyphs according to as many parameters as necessary. Having multiple printers is no problem: we merely tell METAFONT which printer we wish to use, and it applies the correct parameters. PostScript's philosophy is different: according to PostScript, the printer should have a rendering engine intelligent enough to render any glyph according to the parameters provided. We ...