> There's a Knuth quote about how the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to create properly typeset documents. (Emphasis added by me) I have probably read every s

> There's a Knuth quote about how the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to create properly typeset documents. (Emphasis added by me) I have probably read every single word Knuth published on the topic of TeX, and what you said seems very different from what I've gathered of Knuth's philosophy and style. Knuth intended TeX to be used by someone who cares about typesetting, and the program comes with a nearly 500-page manual (The TeXbook) that was very much intended to be read. In fact, he expected anyone who was preparing any special sort of book (a multilingual bible, or dictionary, or whatever) to change the program itself, and has expressed surprise at people using elaborate macro packages like LaTeX or doing everything in TeX macros. (BTW the page you linked at https://www.tug.org/whatis.html https://www.tug.org/whatis.html is also pretty good and note that it says a lot about typography and the finer details of typesetting, and less about ease-of-use: search the page for "support" and "TeX is not the tool for you".) > often seemed to default to bitmap fonts Actually, TeX uses only font metrics, and the output of TeX is merely a set of instructions about where to place what characters from what font. (A compact binary encoding thereof, in the form of a DVI file.) A separate program is needed for actually using the font and rendering the output. (These days everyone uses pdfTeX or some other program that combines the two and uses vector fonts, but that's the original design.) In any case, for the original task that TeX was designed for (completely specifying the appearance of a book, in a future-proof way however technology may change), it is absolutely crucial to combine it with a program for bitmap fonts (and that's Metafont -- it produces only bitmap fonts). Think about it: the rasterization (converting to bitmaps) has to happen somewhere: if you leave it up to some other technology (the one used by the printer or whatever), then you're back to the same problem that led to the creation of TeX, where in a few decades fonts may be produced by some completely different method and you may no longer be able to produce a book whose appearance is identical (except for the typos you fixed or minor rewrites or whatever) to the earlier one.