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Table of Contents

Christophe Grandsire wrote the beginnings of a MetaFont tutorial, but he has sadly not updated it past the second lesson. His tutorials have formed the basis of my instructions here. Where section numbers, exercises, and appendices are referenced, they refer to Christophe's tutorial.

Note that I developed on a Windows XP machine running MikTex and Cygwin. YMMV.

Making a Proof

  1. Write MetaFont .mf source for the characters. [§0.5, ex. 0.1]
  2. Create a gray font from character source code by running MetaFont on it: mf characters.mf.
  3. Convert the gray font to DVI format: gftodiv characters.2602gf.
    • If you have a DVI viewer, use that to view the result characters.dvi file.
    • Otherwise, convert the .dvi file into something your computer can display, such as .ps or .pdf.
    • Troubleshooting: The letter may appear rendered as random characters like badly done ASCII art and your DVI viewer (or PS or PDF or whatever) may complain that it can't find the "gray" font. If this happens, it means your installation of LaTeX didn't precompile the gray font for you. See Appendix B of the tutorial for instructions on compiling it.
  4. View proof; repeat steps until you're happy with the character's shape.

Using a Font

  1. Create the font from your MetaFont source: mf '\mode=ljfour; mode_setup; input characters.mf
  2. Pack the .gf file into a usable format: gftopk characters.600gf characters.pk
  3. Test with a LaTeX document in the same directory. [§ 0.5]