2 ms·

These are the slides from a talk Knuth gave recently in San Francisco, at the public library[1]. I attended (it was FREE!), and I thought it was quite good — th

These are the slides from a talk Knuth gave recently in San Francisco, at the public library[1]. I attended (it was FREE!), and I thought it was quite good — this was the first time I've ever seen Knuth in person, let alone a lecture by him. As other comments note, the slides in isolation aren't really that great; you really need the video. The talk was titled Thirty Two Years of Metafont, with a subtext of "Donald Knuth will reminisce and talk about things he remembers." It was, in fact, his musings on Metafont, which I found quiet interesting. lifepillar helpfully found the video in another comment[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LR_lBEy7qU One of my senior classes in college was Typography, the final project of which was to author a font, A-Z a-z 0-9 and some punctuation. That is a grueling task, and I have a lot of respect now for the people who can do it and have the result not look terrible (as mine did). In particular, in the talk, Knuth notes the difficulty of the letter "S" — which nearly drove me insane trying to render it as part of my final project, so I found it quite humorous that it also gave him a bit of grief. It is a frustrating letter when you need to not just write one, but accurately describe it to a computer. [1]: http://coopertype.org/event/thirty_two_years_of_metafont http://coopertype.org/event/thirty_two_years_of_metafont [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12587556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12587556

taeric 10y ago
Thanks to you and lifepillar for posting the video! I found the link to the slides on his "news" page. I thought a few of the slides would help show, for example, the level with which you could parameterize METAFONT fonts. There was a story recently that was talking about parameterized web fonts, and I found it interesting how few people realized you could do that with METAFONT. I think quite a few people think of it as a bitmap format. I find it to be more akin to svg. The slides of Font Blvd are just plain fun. No surprise that he turned to cataloging diamond signs later. :)

taeric 10y ago

Thanks to you and lifepillar for posting the video! I found the link to the slides on his "news" page. I thought a few of the slides would help show, for example, the level with which you could parameterize METAFONT fonts. There was a story recently that was talking about parameterized web fonts, and I found it interesting how few people realized you could do that with METAFONT. I think quite a few people think of it as a bitmap format. I find it to be more akin to svg. The slides of Font Blvd are just plain fun. No surprise that he turned to cataloging diamond signs later. :)