F.4. METATYPE1 and Antykwa Półtawskiego

In 1999, three Poles—Bogusław Jackowski, Janusz Nowacki, and Piotr Strzelczyk—shocked the TEX world by issuing a new family of fonts, Antykwa Póltawskiego (see §F.4.3), completely programmed in METATYPE1 [198].

In this section, we shall discuss the tool METATYPE1. By developing the tool together with the fonts produced by it, as Knuth had done with METAFONT and the Computer Modern fonts, the three Poles showed that the tool is of genuine practical interest. Let us also mention that in 2003 [197], Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Nowacki produced Computer Modern fonts with METATYPE1, but not simply by rereading the METAFONT code; in fact, they started with PostScript Type 1 fonts and converted them to METATYPE1 code. Next, they cleaned the code up and fitted it with accents for the Latin languages. This is an interesting application of METATYPE1, even though it does not allow us to produced arbitrary Computer Modern fonts.

F.4.1. Installing and Using METATYPE1

While METAFONT does not require any installation, since it has been included in every TEX distribution since the 1980s, things are different for METATYPE1. What is METATYPE1, technically speaking?

It is a set of tools, the most important of which is METAPOST, a program derived from METAFONT, also written by Knuth's student John Hobby, that produces graphics in Encapsulated PostScript [179]. Jackowski and his colleagues wrote special routines in the METAPOST language to generate fonts ...

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