Re: [9fans] Typesetting

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

In article <200101101724.SAA08377@boris.cd.chalmers.se> you write:
>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.

I'm not entirely sure I agree.  I understand what you're saying, but a
letter ``A'' is a letter ``A'' wether rendered in one font or the
other.  Adding metadata to font descriptions allows me to relate facts
about symbols rendered in one font to symbols rendered in another (ie,
this symbol represents the letter ``A'').  I'm not sure it's any deeper
than that.  Then again, I haven't read Knuth's books on the subject.

On another note, Forsyth's comment relating eg Kepler's work to
software is insightful.  We must juxtapose beauty with necessity,
however; Real-world business and time constaints sometimes force us to
do things we'd rather not.  Sometimes I don't have time to come up with
something elegant (though I've long said that the only way to get
maintainable software is to make it elegant), yet the software must be
given to the customer who has to put it into production yesterday.
C'est la vie.

The danger, I think, comes when we can no longer tell ugly from
beautiful, as is clearly the case these days.  Too much time is spent
investing energy in ugly things, like the web and various other
``Internet'' things, because people *think* this is what computing
should look like.  I sure wish I knew how to change that.

	- Dan C.