Newsgroups: can.usrgroup
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: TeX vs. troff
Message-ID: <1989Oct19.161857.19961@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Oct19.035742.1893@telly.on.ca>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 89 16:18:57 GMT

In article <1989Oct19.035742.1893@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>I also haven't yet been given a consistent explanation of what Metafont
>is. Is it:
>a) a tool which creates downloadable fonts, which can be used
>   independently of TeX?
>b) a tool whick creates printer-specific bitmaps of an image to be
>   printed?
>c) the way to teach TeX about new fonts, their sizes and spacing?

More or less all of the above.  Its main job is to turn quasi-algorithmic
descriptions of fonts into bitmaps in specific sizes.  The resulting bitmap
fonts are theoretically usable with anything, although mostly they get used
with TeX.  And font-metric information necessarily is generated at the same
time.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu