[comp.text.tex] Preschool Metafont questions

landsbur@euclid.math.colostate.edu (Steve Landsburg) (11/26/90)

I have just acquired the emtex version of Metafont am trying to get started
generating fonts.  I have the most basic questions possible about what
goes in the command line.

First I tried the following command line
     
          mf &cm \mode=hplaser; \input cmr10
     
and produced a cmr10.300gf file which I assume is cmr10 at 10pt and 300 dots
per inch.  I successfully converted this to .pk using gftopk and got a .pk 
file which was within a few bytes of the size of my existing cmr10.pk.  I
haven't yet actually used the new file, but I assume it's okay and the few
bytes of discrepancy are nothing to worry about.

But what I really want to do is to produce fonts at different point sizes
and different resolutions.  I am particularly eager to get 1270 DPI.  I found
a file called \emtex\mfinput\local.mf which had some mode_def statements, 
so I copied the mode_def hplaser= section, gave it a new name, and changed
pixels_per_inch:=300 to pixels_per_inch:=1270.  I then repeated the above
command line with the new mode name.  Strange things happened which I don't
understand:

1)  I get a gf file called cmr10.2602gf.  Why isn't it cmr10.1270gf?

2)  When I convert to pk, I get a pk file that is about 175K.  Surely this
is too big to be right.  (The gf file is over 200K).

3)  Just for fun, I tried again with mode=junk, where I left junk completely
undefined.  I got exactly the same output as with my 1270 mode, leading me
to believe that metafont treated the 1270 mode as undefined.

4)  At 300dpi, the font is generated without showing each character on the
screen.  When I tried to do 1270, each character was illustrated.  Does this
mean that Metafont was doing something entirely different in the second case?

5)  Assuming I find out how to adjust the resolution, how do I adjust the
point size of the font?  

While I would like to understand all of this, I will be quite happy for the
present if someone could just give me a command line to use to create a 
given font at a given point size and a given resolution.  As long as it works,
I'll be grateful.

Email is much appreciated, since I rarely read this newsgroup.

Thanks.,

Steve Landsburg
landsbur@euclid.math.colostate.edu
.