Hello, scholars,
I have a twofold question, and every hope that the combined knowledge on this forum can answer it.
First: does anyone know which original face was Knuth's inspiration/source for his CR Modern? I find his font very legible and pleasingly inconspicuous -- it knows how to get out of the way! -- but terribly washed out and spindly. As I get older, I find it a real drag to wade through 20 pages set tightly in that font. I was hoping that I could locate his source, and see what the font color of the original was.
Second: I learned from this helpful comment that his older books used to be set in a face named Monotype Modern 8A (see here for a good sample:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/49777/#Comment_49777. Thank you, Mr Romer!). Does anyone know if this wonderful face has been digitized, by any chance?
Thank you all for considering my question!
Comments
3. You can check out New Computer Modern: https://ctan.org/pkg/newcomputermodern
*realistically
Is there an easy way to see what the non-Latins look like?
I have to agree with Mr Papazian about Knuth. Recently, I went and read his piece, on 'mathematical typography.' As I scroll down, I watched in horror how he seduced himself down the garden path of his empty formalism. I actually study some of his gobbledygook as part of my job, so I saw what he was getting at. It's all wrong-headed. Why impose the axiom of invariance under rotations on a font shape? It's not rigid-body mechanics, it's type meant to be read at the same angle, horizontally, unrotated. Same goes for Axiom 4, Locality. Only someone who hasn't designed a font himself would ignore that glyphs must work as a whole too -- as a family-- not just at small neighborhoods around a point. Axiom 6 is a dogmatic imposition ("circles are always best!"), not based in any evidence from the history of type.
They're all the same, these math-minded types -- easily seduced by their own BS appearance of rigor, as if their little axioms could ever match empirical good sense, the wisdom of the masters, and the consensus of proven experts. If that "Consider a spherical cow" joke was ever a propos, it's in this instance.
Lastly, what program must I use to open a Type 3 font file, I wonder? I only have an older version of FLS.
Again, thank you all.
I don't know what "FLS" is here. mpfonts enables the use of these Type 3 fonts in TeX, using a particular dvips command. This produces a PostScript file from a TeX DVI; you can then use ps2pdf to produce a PDF including these Type 3 fonts. Type 3 fonts do not use Bézier curves alone, but instead can use any PostScript code, and so these fonts actually draw the outlines using PostScript (as a direct conversion from METAFONT drawing instructions, instead of an approximation or tracing). Most programs can't use Type 3 fonts directly, but you can look at them and try to figure out what to do if you have the right time and technical knowledge. If you really want, you can see the curves' PostScript code using a text editor.
The other thing that happens it's hard to tell them - and hard for them to hear - that they're wrong when they do this, that the principles from the old field don't apply to the new one. Hard to tell them because we naturally respect experts and tread lightly around them, and hard for them to hear because they're not used to being wrong in their pronouncements. Both these tendencies reinforce their confidence. Nigel Lawson was a competent politician and now unfortunately feels he can talk about climate science; Ben Carson was by all accounts an excellent brain surgeon but that doesn't make him a serious politician; and you should listen to David Icke about football but absolutely nothing else.
In the case of Knuth, it's more difficult again because he (through no fault or desire of his own) acquired a fan base for whom whatever the master does is perfect. If you try telling the TeX community that Computer Modern doesn't really look very nice, or that the TeX leading algorithm is bananas, or that DVI really wasn't a good idea, you may not get a fair hearing.
All that said, I don't think METAFONT is as bad as all that but you have to use it in a way that is dramatically different from the way it's designed. As Hrant says, METAFONT is based on the idea of expanded skeletons but it isn't actually restricted to that; you can use it to define outline paths, and you can adjust the "sides" of the pen independently. (And to be totally fair, the concept wasn't completely off; the idea that you can design type by tracing the outlines of the stroke of the pen is explored in, well, The Stroke Of The Pen.)
The equation solver is based on the principle that letterforms are a set of mathematical equations, and so it can direct your thinking about construction in ways that are not helpful, and you have to break free from that.
But what all this means is that the way to use METAFONT to make nice type is to ignore all the things which make it METAFONT. At which point, why not just use something else?
When I did my Modern revival, I worked from an old letterpress printed sample. But that was in 2005, a good decade or more after Robert Slimbach (Adobe Garamond), Martin Majoor (Scala) and Fred Smeijers (Quadraat) had addressed the emaciating effect of digital typography on legacy serif type styles, by sturdy compensation for the lack of press gain. There is a trick to the (Scotch) Modern, it has always operated at the threshold of rendering ability.
Indeed. And I would recommend that anyone who thinks CM wasn't designed with the printers in mind to find a copy of one of the early books set in TeX, such as one of Knuth's from the era, and look at how the font looks in print.
Also, for a very lovely and true-to-the-spirit revisitation of a great Scotch, I must praise Mr Kutilek's digitization of Frutiger's Mergenthaler Antiqua, Light and Regular. Which he gave to the world as a free gift. No italics yet, but we are free to hope...
"After learning how to draw an S with mathematical precision, I found that the same ideas apply to many other symbols needed in a complete system of fonts for mathematics. In fact, all of the characters in Figure 13 use the same METAFONT subroutine that I first developed for the letter S... Without the theory developed in this paper, I would either have had to abandon my goal of defining books in a mathematical way or I would have had to stop using all of these characters." (Emphasis mine)
(It turns out his The Letter S article is also online. You can see that he took the Roman du Roi stuff seriously, and thought that the reason that real types differ from the mathematical precision of the Roman du Roi is not adjustments for legibility, but that the mathematics weren't good enough and needed improving.)
Both the Romain du Roi and the Bodoni/Didot approach to text fonts (not display!) is rationalism run amok. The thought that a few simple dogmas (straight lines and circles only! vertical stress throughout!) can do better than five centuries of accumulated typographic wisdom about how to pass from handwritten calligraphy to legible, transparent movable type. For a guy who grew upstairs from a printing shop, Knuth seems to have missed that basic point.
Should the arrows pictured above be optically corrected, or should they have the same (mathematical) length? A strict mathematical system might not look as good, but it is more versatile (e.g. it allows to align formulas neatly across multiple lines).
Often these symbols are deliberately designed to contrast with the “normal” text glyphs. Notable exceptions are Garamond Math and Libertinus Math which do not emphasize the organic/mechanical divide most other math fonts employ:
All of the fonts above use a mathematical structure for the technical symbols, non use such a structure for the text glyphs. This is where Computer Modern clashes; its design is mechanical thorough-and-thorough. For Knuth, this approach paid off twice: harmony between the text and math glyphs, and – as @John Hudson notes – the possibility of an expansive font family with variable width, weight, and optical size; all of which are important for professional typesetting of mathematical formulas.
I don't remember the exact details, but, ghostscript has a font sampling utility bundled and ghostscript can certainly process / view type 3 fonts, and also I believe that however I converted type 3 to type 1, ghostscript is involved. So under ghostscript's utility directory there are likely two tools, one for font conversion from type 3 to type 1, and another for generating font sample sheets from any fonts. (the generated sample sheets are postscript obviously, but you can use ghostscript's ps2pdf script to convert to pdf...)
EDIT: the converter program is called wftopfa.ps, the viewer/sampler program is called prfont.ps . The latter is still shipped with current ghostscript, but the former seems to be gone (I assume it is just routine tidy-up - few people needed to convert type 3 to type 1 these days...) - but you can probably get it from older source archive.