Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:357 comp.text:2659 comp.lang.postscript:1073
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!iuvax!hess
From: hess@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Caleb Hess)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts,comp.text,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: METAFONT & PostScript
Summary: They're NOT the same
Message-ID: <14153@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 88 16:20:19 GMT
References: <902@cps3xx.UUCP>
Reply-To: hess@iuvax.UUCP (Caleb Hess)
Organization: Indiana University CSCI, Bloomington
Lines: 12

In article <902@cps3xx.UUCP> smithda@cpsvax.cps.msu.edu (Daniel Smith) writes:
>...  I began to think about the relationship between
>METAFONT and PostScript.  It occured to me that the two do about the 
>same thing, its just that they do it at different times.  METAFONT
>translates source code describing fonts into bit maps, and so
>does PostScript.

One very important difference is that METAFONT makes no attempt to be 
scalable.  While it might be possible to make METAFONT produce 
PostScript code, the resulting fonts would not behave like normal 
METAFONT fonts, which are designed for one point size, or like Adobe's 
fonts, which contain coded-in scaling hints.