[Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format

[Karl Berry]

(Off-topic I guess, sorry.)

    >From the little I've seen, it seems like a tidy parameterisation of
    roman type. 

Metafont is a (more or less) general programming language, with
primitives for defining characters, drawing Beziers, etc.

    it also doesn't make outlines 

True.

    because overlapping was a Hard problem in 1980s, 

I've never heard that advanced as the reason.  John Hobby got his
Ph.D. from Metafont.  There is a lot of pretty serious mathematics going
on (I don't understand it, but I can recognize it :).

My understanding is that the reason is a lot more basic than that: there
was no obvious outline format to use when MF was designed (Type 1 was
not public, Ikarus was not public, don't think anything else feasible
existed).  And the other reason is that Knuth wanted to control every
pixel of the Art of the Computer Programming :).

    so its not that useful for making fonts for use outside TeX.

Modern TeX installations use (essentially) all outline fonts, so it's
not even that useful directly inside TeX.  There have been two main
paths of work: (1) run mf at a high resolution and trace the results;
(2) translate the original metafont source into something else.  A lot
of effort has gone into both approaches.

In any case, the fact remains that Computer Modern remains the only true
meta-font implemented in Metafont with any kind of widespread use.
(Other applications of Metafont have not been meta, and a couple
experiments by Knuth's students, notably Neenie Billawala's Pandora,
remain rather incomplete and not very usable today.)

karl