Typefaces designed with Metafont

James Puckett
James Puckett Posts: 1,998
in Technique and Theory
Has anybody designed a finished typeface with Metafont other than computer modern? By finished, I mean something that’s actually useful to people other than students and hobbyists playing with Metafont.

Comments

  • Dan Reynolds
    Dan Reynolds Posts: 176
    Weren’t the AMS fonts initially designed by Hermann Zapf (on paper) and then digitized with Metafont?
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 752
    edited October 2015
    They were; but they were METAFONTed by the Digital Typography group in Stanford, under Knuth's supervision. I think Dave Siegel was one of the main programmers. He didn't use METAFONT again after that...

    However, you can find a good (probably complete) list of METAFONT fonts on the CTAN (https://www.ctan.org/topic/font-mf), which I think includes some not designed by Knuth or his immediate circle.
  • Belleve Invis
    Belleve Invis Posts: 269
    Well people may not choose Metafont nowdays because it generates bitmap instead of vector shapes.

    I am making a nodejs-based system which creates TTF files directly, but it may be a little difficult, since there are many edge cases performing boolean operations on font components.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,431
    Belleve, is your system actual metafont code, or a new Domain Specific Language for describing letterforms?

    James, Simon and Dan are partially right; the AMS Euler fonts were designed by Zapf on paper and digitised by students at Stanford under Knuth's supervision, but they quickly gave up on using METAFONT as Knuth intended, and used it in an Ikarus-like way to draw the outlines Zapf had sketched. So it doesn't really count for what James is asking, I think. 

    There are a couple of original and 'true' METAFONT types on www.metaflop.com, and there is some non-latin stuff in CTAN. 
  • Belleve Invis
    Belleve Invis Posts: 269
    edited October 2015
    Dave Crossland said:
    Belleve, is your system actual metafont code, or a new Domain Specific Language for describing letterforms?

    James, Simon and Dan are partially right; the AMS Euler fonts were designed by Zapf on paper and digitised by students at Stanford under Knuth's supervision, but they quickly gave up on using METAFONT as Knuth intended, and used it in an Ikarus-like way to draw the outlines Zapf had sketched. So it doesn't really count for what James is asking, I think. 

    There are a couple of original and 'true' METAFONT types on www.metaflop.com, and there is some non-latin stuff in CTAN. 
    Well, my toolchain is not a METAFONT port. It contains several things:
    • node-sfnt, a low-level font parsing and generation library
    • some geometric libraries, for example, libspiro-js
    • a set of PatEL macros, which turns a general-purpose programming language PatEL into a font description language.
    However these things are currently only used to create Iosevka, since programming is still a hard task for type designers.

    But I think we can bring some concepts from, well, industrial parametric design, pretty like drawing sketches in Solidworks.
  • Wei Huang
    Wei Huang Posts: 98
    Dexter Sinister have created current typeface with Metafont http://www.servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=8
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,431
    Belleve, that sounds really cool! I'm looking forward to seeing how you progress, and I hope that some of the node libraries developed for Metapolator and Prototypo could be relevant for you :)

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