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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label MF</title>
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<h3>What is Metafont?</h3>
<p/>Metafont was written by Knuth as a companion to TeX; whereas TeX
defines the layout of glyphs on a page, Metafont defines the shapes of
the glyphs and the relations between them. Metafont details the sizes of
glyphs, for TeX’s benefit, and details the rasters used to
represent the glyphs, for the benefit of programs that will produce
printed output as post processes after a run of TeX.
<p/>Metafont’s language for defining fonts permits the expression of several
classes of things: first (of course), the simple geometry of the
glyphs; second, the properties of the print engine for which the
output is intended; and third, ‘meta’-information which can
distinguish different design sizes of the same font, or the difference
between two fonts that belong to the same (or related) families.
<p/>Knuth (and others) have designed a fair range of fonts using Metafont,
but font design using Metafont is much more of a minority skill than is
TeX macro-writing. The complete TeX-user nevertheless needs to
be aware of Metafont, and to be able to run Metafont to generate personal
copies of Meta-fonts that come her way.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=MF">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=MF</a>
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