Hidden gems of Metafont that are still worth it?

Question

I've read up on the conversion from METAFONT to OTF via mf2pt1 and FontForge.

Are there some "forgotten" fonts where such a conversion would make sense?

I'd rather use Latin Modern than try to do all the conversion work from CM myself. (And I seriously doubt my artfulness to do it better.) But are there some fonts that were not converted to modern formats, where a conversion would make sense?

Would this be of interest? Not exactly what you asked. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/403401/do-the-latex-2-09-hebrew-fonts-have-truetype-opentype-versions — , Jan 15 '18 at 01:10
That's roughly the procedure, I'd apply, if I'd find something interesting to apply it to. The latter is what I am asking for here. — Oleg Lobachev, Jan 15 '18 at 10:03

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 16 '18 at 03:41

Yes there still exist worthwhile fonts that exist in METAFONT format and are not already available in OTF.

A couple of examples are the Devanagari (Sanskrit) fonts by Velthuis and Wikner: see this answer for details on what these fonts are, and what has been done already. The interesting addition here would be to remap the glyphs from the font to their Unicode points, and to set up GSUB rules, etc. This would be worthwhile to do, as there is still some interest in using those fonts. I think there exist other similar examples of Non-Latin fonts (for example the fonts inside bangtex and bengali, in the directory mentioned below).

More generally, you can look inside the /texmf-dist/fonts/source/public directory in a TeX Live distribution. (One from many years ago is here.) Or even go one level higher…

One interesting font that is of historical interest would have been the Punk METAFONT, which Knuth wrote about in TUGboat, after creating it in a single afternoon:

At 1 p.m. I went to the computer and began to compose a simple base file. […] by 4 p.m. I was ready to make the first trial setting of text

But it looks like this has already been converted to OTF by Khaled Hosny; see the punknova package on CTAN or his punk-otf GitHub repo.

Hidden gems of Metafont that are still worth it?

1 Answers1