2 ms·

But the bitmaps can be of any resolution, can't they? Is there any really cogent reason to prefer vector output?

• jimhefferon 6y ago
  File size is one, since the output documents only hold the one font, whether it is for body text or section headers. Another reason is magnify-ability, or zoom in-ability. Authors are annoyed when they produce a graphic, and then include it in a document, say expanded to 120% of its original size or shrunk to 75%, and it contains jaggie letters. Similarly, readers are annoyed to blow up a map and find that the town names are hard to read. Still another is that one set of fonts will do for essentially all documents, so on your hard drive you don't need a set at 10 pts, another set at 11, etc. The space these take up is less of an issue than it used to be, but it is an administrative annoyance. Another issue impacted me a lot since I put stuff up for download. You have to maintain a number of outputs for the dpi-ness of various output devices, so that people reading on a screen use a different output file than people using a printer. In addition, Knuth has settings called things like blacker to tune the output for the physical output device engine, so you may want to maintain output file versions tuned for a number of different vendor's devices. Besides, at some point printers just became vector devices. Basically, the market has spoken.
  • daffy 6y ago
    Right, so: if one intends to sell a font, Metafont may not be a good idea, but if the purpose is to make a font for one's own use in book typography, and one is otherwise inclined to Metafont, then these concerns needn't stand in one's way. And perhaps it would be possible to make a vector-outputting version, if this has already been done for MetaPost.
    • lifepillar 6y ago
      There is MetaType1 [0], which is MetaPost-based. [0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/MetaType1 https://wiki.contextgarden.net/MetaType1
    • jimhefferon 6y ago
      Sure, feel free.