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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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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, &lsquo;meta&rsquo;-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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