Re: GSoC 2020 update, May 30

[Carl Sorensen]

On Sat, May 30, 2020 at 4:34 PM Owen Lamb <owendlamb@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all. Sorry for the radio silence the past couple days. I got rather
> overwhelmed trying to learn Metafont on my own, and the schedule I set up
> for myself broke down rather quickly. I'll do my best to give my next
> weekly report on time (i.e. on Friday).
>
> Since I gave an update earlier this week, I'll just fill you in on the last
> couple days. In the future, this will be a regular thing on Fridays. So,
> without further ado...
>
> I started work on Han-Wen's suggested order of operations. In order to make
> the .mf files output a SMuFL code to their log, I needed to learn Metafont,
> which proved to be a language as little documented as it is ingenious.
> First, I followed the Metafont tutorial provided in the LilyPond docs
> (found at http://metafont.tutorial.free.fr/). It seemed to be
> unfinished, so I started looking at the other resources on that site. *The
> METAFONT Book* was comprehensive, but, since TeXing it is not legally
> allowed, I looked off the source, which is rather difficult to parse out.
> (I'm considering just buying the book, as it would be good for future
> reference even outside LilyPond.) Still, I finally got something together
> that outputs a hex code for each character, defaulting to "0" if SMuFL
> isn't yet implemented for it. (I had to use strings because MF doesn't
> support numbers at/above 4096.) I do have a question about making the code
> cleaner, but I'll save that for a separate message to keep replies
> organized.

Here's an inexpensive copy of the MetafontBook.

https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-C-Metafont-Book/dp/0201134454


HTH,

Carl