[Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format

[Dave Crossland]

On 01/11/06, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
> (Off-topic I guess, sorry.)

I replied offlist but now figure it might be of interest...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com>
Date: 01-Nov-2006 23:44
Subject: Re: [Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format
To: Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>


On 01/11/06, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>
>     because overlapping was a Hard problem in 1980s,
>
> I've never heard that advanced as the reason.

I blogged about this at
http://understandinglimited.com/2006/10/10/metafont/ and its my
understanding from reading
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb19-3/tb60kinch.pdf

As you say, off topic, maybe continue public discussion in my blog comments? :-)

--
Regards,
Dave


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>
Date: 02-Nov-2006 22:34
Subject: Re: [Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format
To: dave at lab6.com


    understanding from reading
    http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb19-3/tb60kinch.pdf

Ah, very good.  Been a long time since I read that article.  I defer to
Kinch, of course, although I think the other reasons I advanced are
still valid.

    maybe continue public discussion in my blog comments?

I clicked submit and nothing happened.  Here's what I wrote:

Metafont is a general-purpose programming language, not really a font
design program with parameters you can tweak.  I mean, of course there
are zillions of built-in parameters, but not stuff like "make the stems
thicker".  That's all done in the application.

People have expended a lot of effort on making outlines from the
Computer Modern metafonts, and there are good results; these outlines
are the default in TeX distributions nowadays.

Happy fontmaking.