From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>
Message-Id: <200101101724.SAA08377@boris.cd.chalmers.se>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Cc: lac@cd.chalmers.se
Subject: [9fans] Typesetting
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 18:24:39 +0100
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4a580342-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

1. One question is whether or not Knuth has access to a C/A/T
phototypesetter.  They were not that common.  I can't remember when
the company folded either, was it bought by WANG or something? I could
go look at 20 year old mail and see, I suppose, except I think that
mail is backed up on 9-track.

2.  This is a quote from the Metafont book.  chapter 1 page 1  (paragraph 2)

	Why is the system called METAFONT?  The FONT part is easy to
	understand, because sets of related characters that are used
	in typesetting are traditionally known as fonts of type.  The
	META part is more interesting:  It indicates that we are interested
	in making high level descriptions that transcend any of the
	individual fonts being described.

(Okay. So ``transcendence'' is not some woolly idea that I am bringing up
because I lack mathematical rigor or even common sense.  It is the design
goal of the whole project.)

The consensus among pre-computer font designers is that there is, by definition
no such thing as a beautiful font that can be described by a high level
description which transcends itself.  Fonts are *wholly* immanent, and are
indeed a refutation of the Platonic theory that you can find some ideal
font that all fonts are the reflection of.  Each font can only be utterly
what it is in relevance only to itself  and the materials one uses to print
it ... ink and paper.  The entire beauty of a font comes in the things
which make it uniquely what it is and what nothing else can be.  A font is
like a tree, or a collection of pebbles.  Only the trivial and boring
bits about it can be abstracted out ... the part where a a font becomes
beautiful or not is precisely where is cannot transcend.

Thus, non-computer font people, hearing of TEX were firmly convinced that
nothing beautiful could ever be produced with it because METAFONT was a
true heresy, an attempt to substitute mathematical beauty for the beauty
of real physical things.  It was a very cool and fascinating heresy because
there is something deep in the heart of all people who love mathematics to
wish that font design was a place where mathematical beauty was responsible
for font and font family beauty.  I feel almost the same way reading about
Kepler's early attempt to model the positions of the planets based on
constructable regular sided solids.  It would be *so* *cool* if it had been
that way.  But the beauty of the solar system is only partially mathematics.
Some of the beauty is in that it *is*.  And Kepler's beautiful music-of-the-
spheres model had to be scrapped because it was wrong.

However, it is impossible to prove that the old-time font designers were
correct and that Knuth was persuing a delusion.  After all, the reason that
the fonts produced were ugly could be that the designers were lousy, and 
there is every reason to expect them to be lousy at it because most people
who started designing fonts with METAFONT were computer people ... i.e.
people with little or no formal artistic training, who were doing this for
the first time, often in the mistaken belief that what they were doing
ought to be easy.

I am curious as to what font design is like in Japan or other places where
there is a strong tradition of calligraphy and where letters, like bricks
or phonemes do not exist.  What do Japanese font designers say it takes
to make a good font?

Laura Creighton