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#metafont
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Preparing tomorrow's workshop at @ANRT with @Ludi @AntoineGelgon and @eugbidaut and going back to
"Lessons Learned from #Metafont by #DonaldKnuth and this incredible erratic and beautiful attemps to draw numbers in 1977.
#typography #MetaFont #TeX
![5 series of digits 2 , 5, 6, 7 and 8. With the text "By the end of 1977, the mimerais in my experimental meta-font had evolved to the point shown in Figure 6. I was satisfied with them at the time, so I spent mort of 1978 working on the TDC typesetting system and doing other sorts of computer science research. In 1979 I decided to design a symbolic language for letterforms that would reflect at a higher level what I had been thinking about when writing my ALGOL programs in 1977; this new language became the original META-FONT system [4]. Considerable work was necessary in 1980 to hook up the output of METAFONT with a high-resolution phototypesetter; during this time I was preoccupied with software problems and unable to do much with the font designs. Then fmally I reached the goal that I had hoped to achieve two years earlier: I completed the second edition of my book Seminumer-ical Algorithms [5], a 700-page work in which every-thing but the illustrations had been done entirely by new computer methods. Altogether 35 fonts were used in that book—seven sizes of roman, six of italic, and three each of bold and slanted and typewriter styles, with each size drawn separately; there were six versions [...]"](https://post.lurk.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/015/740/999/239/282/original/41036b0499c8e14d.png "5 series of digits 2 , 5, 6, 7 and 8. With the text \"By the end of 1977, the mimerais in my experimental meta-font had evolved to the point shown in Figure 6. I was satisfied with them at the time, so I spent mort of 1978 working on the TDC typesetting system and doing other sorts of computer science research. In 1979 I decided to design a symbolic language for letterforms that would reflect at a higher level what I had been thinking about when writing my ALGOL programs in 1977; this new language became the original META-FONT system [4]. Considerable work was necessary in 1980 to hook up the output of METAFONT with a high-resolution phototypesetter; during this time I was preoccupied with software problems and unable to do much with the font designs. Then fmally I reached the goal that I had hoped to achieve two years earlier: I completed the second edition of my book Seminumer-ical Algorithms [5], a 700-page work in which every-thing but the illustrations had been done entirely by new computer methods. Altogether 35 fonts were used in that book—seven sizes of roman, six of italic, and three each of bold and slanted and typewriter styles, with each size drawn separately; there were six versions [...]\"")