[metafont] Re: [metapost]

[Laurence Finston]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Larry Siebenmann :
> > Hans wrote (Tue Jan 18 05:56:10 2005):
> >
> >  > imo, in a sense mf is kind of 'dead', i.e. replaced by metapost
> >  > and/or font editing programs and.or a combination of those
> >

I think it's nice that it's possible to use MP for making fonts, but if I
specifically want a font, i.e., run-length encoded bit-maps, I think this
would be a rather roundabout way of doing it.  I also believe that the
digitization routines of MF are interesting in their own right.

In my field, linguistics, people often talk about "dead" languages,
often implying a value judgement, as though "survival of the
fittest" applied to languages.  It's not so.  Languages can't die,
because they were never alive.

My work with fonts involved making a font that imitates as closely as
possible the writing used in a particular medieval manuscript.  I also
made a couple of fonts with modified characters from the cm and ec fonts
to represent characters from that manuscript.  Since the first font
will probably only be used in a single work, it doesn't really matter
to me how many other people are using MF.  I suppose it would be
possible to use PostScript to write the palaeographic font.  I don't
know PostScript, but from what I've seen of it, it doesn't look like it
would be as much fun to program in as MF.  That, for me, is really the
main point.  At the time I started learning MF, I was using Autocad (and
Autolisp) a lot.  LISP is one of my favorite languages, but it was still
much more fun to write MF than Autolisp.  That's why I chose to use the MF
language as the basis of the GNU 3DLDF language.

There are people interested in MF, so I think it's worthwhile to maintain
the list.  I think a single list would be a good idea, too, but it
shouldn't be called `metapost at tug.org'.

I apologize for the cross posting, and I'll be glad to stop when a
solution is found.

Laurence