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 con

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.