Hi!

"Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> writes:

>...
> Long ago, Scientific American printed a paragraph in which certain
> parameters (numbers that define, in this case) for the letters of the text
> were changed just a wee bit for each consecutive letter. I've forgotten
> details, but the progressive transformation might have been, say, from
> serif to sans.

Nice! Yes, if you program your Meta-font correctly, you can simply
change one parameter and get such a sequence.

BTW, I did use Metafont for my earliest conlang Fukhian. I programmed
several font styles in one file. Very easy to select attached serifs,
etc. Some font samples are here:

http://www.theiling.de/conlang/s1/compiled/hitchhiker.gif
http://www.theiling.de/conlang/s1/fuch.gif
http://www.theiling.de/conlang/s1/sample.gif
http://www.theiling.de/conlang/s1/sample.ps
http://www.theiling.de/conlang/s1/compiled/fuch.ps

> Although Metafont is brilliant work, as far as I know, the faces created
> by it that I have seen (not many, to be sure) somehow were more functional
> than attractive -- lacking beauty.

Right. As far as I know, only two fonts are thoroughly implemented,
both by Knuth himself: the standard TeX font Computer Modern, and
another one he used for one of his books. I forgot its name.
However, both are not very aesthetical to me either. When I generate
documents with TeX, I'll always switch the font to a PS font (normally
Palatino), so although I like Metafont a lot, the lack of nice looking
fonts makes me neglect it, too...

> > IIRC, modern screens even transfer their knowledge about the screen
> > resolution back to X.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised. Linux hardware detection often finds out quite a
> bit.

Currently I'm at work and it say I have 99x98dpi. :-) I did not tell
it anything about the screen -- the communication works perfectly. It
even automatically selects the right screen resolution when attaching
the monitor cable to my laptop. Instead of 1024 it uses the 1600
resolution. Works very well. Just compare the pain X configuration
was a few years ago...

**Henrik