What Hacker News says

svatMay 2026

See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf

svatJun 2020

If all you have is a few seconds, take a look at https://www.metaflop.com/modulator — play with the sliders, or click "flop it!" a few times.

That's the best very-quick introduction today to the basic ideas behind Metafont I think, and the best less-short one is Knuth's “The Concept of a Meta-Font” (1982) — this 25-page paper (in large font so it's really not very long) is IMO not just a great read but a brilliant performance (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/...)

BTW the submitted link here goes to the “raw” .web source code of the METAFONT program, but that was meant to be read in typeset form: http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/mf/mf.pdf

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svatApr 2020

Those who enjoy this sort of thing might also enjoy reading Donald Knuth's “The Concept of a Meta-Font” (from 1982): http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/61/article/748 — although the technology used is very different (it was designed for print after all), he plays a lot of lovely tricks with the font on the page (changing x-height, “e-height”, etc), including gradually transitioning from a serif to a sans-serif typeface. Note that even the “production” Computer Modern family available by default with TeX distributions itself has all its typefaces (including sans-serif, monospaced, bold, italic, etc. variants) by varying parameters in a single font. Direct link to PDF: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/V16N1...

Also, look at Metaflop modulator: https://www.metaflop.com/modulator

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svatJun 2017

Parametric fonts are cool. I think it's a stretch to say things like "Opening up to a new era of type design" though. Yes, the feature of "variable fonts" was added to the OpenType specification somewhat recently, in September 2016. But before that there was Adobe's "multiple master fonts", and even before that, there was Knuth's METAFONT, something that could have been a truly "new era of type design" but never took off.

See http://www.metaflop.com/modulator for an example of parametric fonts, inspired by Knuth's system: you can drag the sliders to adjust various font parameters, and get many different fonts. Knuth's article The Concept of a Meta-Font [1], published in Visible Language, is a classic. As you read the article he plays various tricks with the fonts as he describes them; it's a delightful read. (His followup article "Lessons learned from Metafont" [2] is also interesting.)

Unfortunately METAFONT as envisioned by Knuth never gained much adoption by other font designers, for (AFAICT) two reasons:

1. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a response [3] pointing out that it is not possible to mechanize all typefaces into a single one, which although a valid point (the article is great), attacks a straw man, arguing against an absurd claim that Knuth never even suggested IMO. So some may have got the wrong impression from it.

2. More importantly, as Richard Southall or Chuck Bigelow (I forget who) said, most type designers think with shapes; they don't think about shapes. Only a mind like Knuth's would prefer to think deeply about the shape of each letter and come up with symbolic descriptions of each, parametrized across the whole family (see Knuth's article The letter S [4] on his struggles with doing this for just one character).

Knuth has often said that we understand things better when we can teach them to a computer, and I still have hope for a future with parametric fonts that are better "understood": not because the shapes will be better, but simply because humanity will be better off with a deeper understanding of letterforms. But I think that whatever the technology, the task of parametrizing shapes will run into similar challenges, some of which were described in the above-mentioned articles and say Richard Southall's Designing New Typefaces with Metafont [5].

[1]: http://www.zigzaganimal.be/elements/the-concept-of-metafont....

[2]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/19.1/...

[3]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.4/... / https://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR136.pdf

[4]: http://www.cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/Papers/The%20letter%20S.pdf

[5]: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-8...

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gjm11Oct 2009

Knuth's paper "The concept of a meta-font" (from 1981) has a nice example in which he typesets Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd ..."), changing the parameters of his font a little with every character. It's sans-serif at one end, serif at the other. (Among other things.) Regrettably, this demonstration doesn't seem to be available online. You can find it, e.g., in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas".

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svatMay 2026

Actually:

• He had already published the first editions of Volume 1, 2, 3, and the second edition of Volume 1, by 1973. It was in 1977 when the publishers sent him galley proofs for the second edition of Volume 2, having switched to phototypesetting (away from hot-metal typesetting a la Linotype, though IIRC it was actually Monotype) that he was disappointed with the results. And he had some back-and-forth with them and they did improve their fonts (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48), but he was still dissatisfied.

> I didn't know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn't want to write any more.

• At this time he came to know of the existence of digital typesetters. Typesetting with computers had existed before, but it had always seemed a crude toy, rather than something suitable for “real books”. But he saw Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence that had been just published (I think he got an early proof copy to review or something), and he realized for the first time that digital typesetting was an option (apparently Winston's book was printed at >1000dpi, and Knuth later got his hands on a machine that claimed a resolution of 5333 dpi: see this wonderful comment from Knuth's student and “right-hand man”, David Fuchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875)

• In fact it was the fonts that he was dissatisfied with rather than the typesetting, so METAFONT was in some sense the primary/motivating project and TeX was only written in order to be able to use METAFONT.

• Actually his first idea was to simply take the old fonts, get high-resolution scans of them (not easy to obtain at that time) and use them directly. He approached Xerox Research Center but:

> I asked if I could use Xerox's lab facilities to create my fonts. The answer was yes, but there was a catch: Xerox insisted on all rights to the use of any fonts that I developed with their equipment. Of course that was their privilege, but such a deal was unacceptable to me: A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belongs to God.

• So he went home and (after trying a bit with TV cameras) tried projecting photographs of the pages onto the wall and tracing the outlines, and it was while staring at these images that he realized that the shapes of letters were not arbitrary but there was some logic to them (e.g. in the font he was using, the spacing between the vertical strokes in 'm' was equal, and equal to that in 'n'), and he decided (as a computer programmer) to capture this design in code — something that had never before been done. The hardest letter to capture this way is S, hence the paper in the OP.

> Finally, a simple thought struck me. Those letters were designed by people. If I could understand what those people had in their minds when they were drawing the letters, then I could program a computer to carry out the same ideas. Instead of merely copying the form of the letters my new goal was therefore to copy the intelligence underlying that form. I decided to learn what type designers knew, and to teach that knowledge to a computer.

• This is also why METAFONT never really caught on among typographers: as Charles Bigelow (quoted by Richard Southall, https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf) observed, “the designer thinks with images, not about images”. Knuth did not want crude “geometric” constructions of letters (as some prior 16th century typographers had attempted: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979... and as some typographers only passingly familiar with METAFONT think!). He wanted actual real typographically beautiful shapes, but to be able to generate those shapes with code. This is obviously much harder than simply drawing the shapes using visual intuition, even if it enables variation. (See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf — again, many people in the typography world confuse the abstract concept of a meta-font introduced in this paper with (their incorrect impressions of) the METAFONT program, and omit crediting Knuth for variable fonts).

• The second edition of Volume 2 was not printed with Linotype. Yes the machines still existed in Europe and he talked to typesetters (he mentions in particular a person from Belfast), but it was in fact published using TeX (the first version, TeX77 and MF78). He was still unhappy with the results, though, and spent a few more years learning more about typography and working with people like Bigelow and Hermann Zapf, before the rewrite into the current TeX82 and MF84 (and current version of Computer Modern). I think it's only with the third edition (1997) that he's finally satisfied.

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