Belleek: A Call for METAFONT Revival
Richard J. Kinch · 1998
Despite the importance of mathematical typesetting to the persistent popularity of TEX, very few TEX math fonts are available to complement the thousands of available text typefaces. Developing fonts is a very different enterprise from programming other software, requiring different tools and different skills, offering little reward in technical innovation, and often requiring a commercial price to justify the effort. To the corpus of public-domain TEX software, we contribute Belleek, a new set of hand-drawn math fonts to complement Times, published simultaneously in METAFONT, Type 1, and TrueType formats, and compatible with the LATEX mathtime package. We describe the difficult process of creating such software with a graphical editor, which motivates a second-look at META-FONT as a practical design tool. We examine Hoenig’s METAFONT-based MathKit software as a paradigm of fitting math fonts to text typefaces, concluding that METAFONT will become practical only when it gains a visual editor for input and outline fonts for output.