LibreDesign: TeX/MetaFont Detour
The foundation of Free/Libre Open Source is connected to the greater domain of printing and Graphic Design. A particularly interesting one (and perhaps the most sad that it isn’t a part of contemporary typographic teachings) is Donald Knuth and the origins of the typesetting program TeX, and its font-language, Metafont.
Donald Knuth was so offended by the bad typesetting of a second printing of his computer programming books that he decided to invent his own typesetting program to solve the problems bothering him.
Donald Knuth says that his aim in creating TEX is to beautifully typeset technical documents especially those containing a lot of Mathematics. (LATEX Tutorials, A PRIMER, Indian TEX Users Group, Trivandrum, India, 2003 September, I.1.2. Why LATEX?, pg.8)
Donald Knuth is told by his publishers that his “Art of Computer Programming” is going to be reprinted; it has sold so well. The first edition of the book was typeset using a monotype machine. One original master was made from the monotype castings, and then that master was photographed and turned into offset printing plates for the production of the books. By the time the second edition was to be published, the industry was switching to phototypsetting. This galley proof that Knuth receives of the phototypeset pages makes him so depressed, its just so bad looking in comparison, that he says, hey publisher, I’m going on sabbatical, and I’ll just write a computer program and make my own fonts that will reproduce this old technique, rather than rely on the phototypsetters to figure it out, as it appears that they can’t … (Okay, find the videos where he explains this on https://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/ )
It ends up leading to a collaboration with Charles Bigleow, Hermann Zapf, and more … and students he had that worked with him on TeX and metafont go on to release the first digital typeface, Lucida… and convince Adobe that bitmap fonts designed specifically for laser printing are useful … (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb34-2/tb107bigelow-wang.pdf)
“It is noteworthy and commendable, too, that Knuth published all the Metafont code for his designs. For commercial reasons, most typefaces are marketed with intellectual property restrictions, but Knuth saw his typographic work as part of a greater goal, the publication of scientific literature and the dissemination of knowledge. He did the same with his TEX system for mathematical composition, publishing the source code for wide usage. A paragon of enlightened generosity.” — Charles Bigelow, in an interview in TUGboat, Volume 34 (2013), №2 (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb34-2/tb107bigelow-wang.pdf)
There is a real connection between commonly used, continuously up-kept open source software and designing — TeX!
Here’s a perfect place that typography, designing, and F/LOS can come together (these couple of pages are typeset with LaTeX)
Here is a computer programmer and mathematician reading about printing and typeface design, but are there designers studying the reverse? Why don’t we teach Knuth in typography classes!? You don’t have to pay extra, and everyone can use the skills they learn forever into the future!
This needs a project to go with it for sure — use some TeX tool to typeset a document? Research metafont and then see how that connects to contemporary variable fonts?
What sort of map illustrates all how all the design stuff we do and use today ties back to knuth? He was there in the bay working on this stuff at the same time as jobs and apple and warnock and Adobe…
