April 1994
Intermediate to advanced
522 pages
9h 12m
English
Content preview from Making TeX WorkBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 11. Introducing MetaFont
TeX builds pages out of boxes and glue. The smallest boxes are usually individual characters. MetaFont is a tool that creates the actual characters.
In the last few years, a real explosion has taken place in the number of readily available fonts. Today, many people have access to a large number of high quality typefaces. Not too long ago (before Adobe Type Manager (ATM) was available for the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows), fonts were too expensive to be generally available. In those days, a font building tool like MetaFont was essential if TeX was going to have a number of typefaces and a large number of mathematical symbols. Today, the role of MetaFont is diminishing. Many people choose to use PostScript fonts almost entirely. In fact, with PostScript alternatives to the Computer Modern Math fonts now available, it's possible to use TeX without using MetaFont fonts at all.
On the other hand, lots of people do still use the Computer Modern fonts, and there are many other MetaFont fonts (for non-English languages like Arabic and Japanese, for example), so MetaFont is still a useful tool. Also, it can be used to make nice portable diagrams.
This chapter cannot teach you how to harness all of MetaFont's power. The only practical way to learn how to design your own images with MetaFont is to read The \MF{}book [kn:mfbook] (even if your images are nowhere near as complex as an entire font).
What you will learn from this chapter is how to run MetaFont ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.