3 ms·

It's more like 8 years of Metafont, and 24 of its corpse clinging to TeX like some sort of husk.

by Camillo 10y ago

acqq 10y ago
I believe it is still the best way for Knuth to fulfill his goals: “Ever since those beginnings in 1977, the TeX research project that I embarked on was driven by two major goals. The first goal was quality: we wanted to produce documents that were not just nice, but actually the best. […] The second major goal was archival: to create systems that would be independent of changes in printing technology as much as possible. When the next generation of printing devices came along, I wanted to be able to retain the same quality already achieved, instead of having to solve all the problems anew. I wanted to design something that would be still usable in 100 years.” (from "Digital Typography" by Knuth)
- nailer 10y ago
  I remember reading something like that - the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to produce high quality typeset documents. Then when I actually used TeX (or LaTeX or whatever the variant was at the time), metafont not only allowed, but defaulted to bitmap fonts. :\
  - dubya 10y ago
    Metafont produces bitmap fonts, but the description is in vectors. You have to remember that generating bitmaps from outlines takes a decent amount of computing power, especially pre-1990, and caching the bitmaps is a reasonable default.
    - jandrese 10y ago
      It was a reasonable default. These days it's far more suspect. TeX in general has the feel of an application that's been stuck in the 80s for a long long time.
      - acqq 10y ago
        The "core" of TeX (actually the only thing that should be called "TeX", the part that Knuth developed and maintains) is so by design decision (his initial decision, that I quoted). What's today used by the other as "TeX" is actually some independently maintained collection around of that core (a "distribution" like TeX Live or MikTeX) and it can and is intentionally "adapted" to the more modern times by its maintainers. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/167470/how-to-follow-the-knuth-license http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/167470/how-to-follow-... Knuth's paraphrased license: "it can be used freely, modified to suit one's needs, but -- if changed -- given a new name." ... "the reason for the name change request/requirement is practical -- to avoid the confusion" Then, once Knuth decided his TeX is stable enough, he even introduced the version numbering system that would make quite obvious his decision that the changes should happen almost never (the version number length increases with every change, making it always harder for everybody to refer to the newer version if it happens): "Since version 3 (released 1989) TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.14159265; it was last updated 2014-01-12." An answer on the StackOverflow discussing the possibility of TeX successor, from 2008: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303877/is-a-successor-for-tex-latex-in-sight http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303877/is-a-successor-for...
      - dubya 10y ago
        The default now is that no one uses Metafont, so it doesn't really matter what it outputs. AFAIK, (almost) no one outputs dvi files, or uses whatever the old font choosing mechanism was, either. The Computer Modern fonts are still pretty commonly used, and probably look somewhat dated, but it's not that difficult to use other fonts, especially if you choose a TeX variant like XeTeX. I think Metafont tried to address a lot of things that were really only interesting to type designers, who turn out to be largely allergic to designing fonts in a text editor. Some of the ideas were revisited in the Adobe Multiple Master fonts, now extinct, and I believe there's a new version of (fonts with axes in addition to size).
  - anon_133A1A0 10y ago
    All fonts are bitmap in the end (in typical printers or screens), because putting ink or darkening a pixel is a "bit" (on or off). What Metafont is doing is converting the glyph description (expressed with curves, etc.) to a bitmap optimized for a specific output device. Therefore the rasterization is not happening on the printer but on a different computer. This has nothing to do with low quality (as you seem to imply) and can probably lead to even better results.

It's more like 8 years of Metafont, and 24 of its corpse clinging to TeX like some sort of husk.

by Camillo 10y ago

It's more like 8 years of Metafont, and 24 of its corpse clinging to TeX like some sort of husk.

acqq 10y ago

I believe it is still the best way for Knuth to fulfill his goals: “Ever since those beginnings in 1977, the TeX research project that I embarked on was driven by two major goals. The first goal was quality: we wanted to produce documents that were not just nice, but actually the best. […] The second major goal was archival: to create systems that would be independent of changes in printing technology as much as possible. When the next generation of printing devices came along, I wanted to be able to retain the same quality already achieved, instead of having to solve all the problems anew. I wanted to design something that would be still usable in 100 years.” (from "Digital Typography" by Knuth)

nailer 10y ago
I remember reading something like that - the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to produce high quality typeset documents. Then when I actually used TeX (or LaTeX or whatever the variant was at the time), metafont not only allowed, but defaulted to bitmap fonts. :\
- dubya 10y ago
  Metafont produces bitmap fonts, but the description is in vectors. You have to remember that generating bitmaps from outlines takes a decent amount of computing power, especially pre-1990, and caching the bitmaps is a reasonable default.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    It was a reasonable default. These days it's far more suspect. TeX in general has the feel of an application that's been stuck in the 80s for a long long time.
    - acqq 10y ago
      The "core" of TeX (actually the only thing that should be called "TeX", the part that Knuth developed and maintains) is so by design decision (his initial decision, that I quoted). What's today used by the other as "TeX" is actually some independently maintained collection around of that core (a "distribution" like TeX Live or MikTeX) and it can and is intentionally "adapted" to the more modern times by its maintainers. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/167470/how-to-follow-the-knuth-license http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/167470/how-to-follow-... Knuth's paraphrased license: "it can be used freely, modified to suit one's needs, but -- if changed -- given a new name." ... "the reason for the name change request/requirement is practical -- to avoid the confusion" Then, once Knuth decided his TeX is stable enough, he even introduced the version numbering system that would make quite obvious his decision that the changes should happen almost never (the version number length increases with every change, making it always harder for everybody to refer to the newer version if it happens): "Since version 3 (released 1989) TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.14159265; it was last updated 2014-01-12." An answer on the StackOverflow discussing the possibility of TeX successor, from 2008: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303877/is-a-successor-for-tex-latex-in-sight http://stackoverflow.com/questions/303877/is-a-successor-for...
    - dubya 10y ago
      The default now is that no one uses Metafont, so it doesn't really matter what it outputs. AFAIK, (almost) no one outputs dvi files, or uses whatever the old font choosing mechanism was, either. The Computer Modern fonts are still pretty commonly used, and probably look somewhat dated, but it's not that difficult to use other fonts, especially if you choose a TeX variant like XeTeX. I think Metafont tried to address a lot of things that were really only interesting to type designers, who turn out to be largely allergic to designing fonts in a text editor. Some of the ideas were revisited in the Adobe Multiple Master fonts, now extinct, and I believe there's a new version of (fonts with axes in addition to size).
- anon_133A1A0 10y ago
  All fonts are bitmap in the end (in typical printers or screens), because putting ink or darkening a pixel is a "bit" (on or off). What Metafont is doing is converting the glyph description (expressed with curves, etc.) to a bitmap optimized for a specific output device. Therefore the rasterization is not happening on the printer but on a different computer. This has nothing to do with low quality (as you seem to imply) and can probably lead to even better results.