Donald Knuth, 1979, Mathematical Typografy, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) Volume 1, Number 2 (1979), 337-372 PDF

BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE
AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY

Volume 1, Number 2, March 1979
MATHEMATICAL TYPOGRAPHY
BY DONALD E. KNUTH
Dedicated to George Plya on his 90th birthday
ABSTRACT. Mathematics books and journals do not look as beautiful as they

used to. It is not that their mathematical content is unsatisfactory, rather
that the old and well-developed traditions of typesetting have become too
expensive. Fortunately, it now appears that mathematics itself can be used
to solve this problem.
A first step in the solution is to devise a method for unambiguously
specifying mathematical manuscripts in such a way that they can easily be
manipulated by machines. Such languages, when properly designed, can be
learned quickly by authors and their typists, yet manuscripts in this form
will lead directly to high quality plates for the printer with little or no
human intervention.
A second step in the solution makes use of classical mathematics to
design the shapes of the letters and symbols themselves. It is possible to give
a rigorous definition of the exact shape of the letter "a", for example, in such
a way that infinitely many styles (bold, extended, sans-serif, italic, etc.) are
obtained from a single definition by changing only a few parameters. When
the same is done for the other letters and symbols, we obtain a mathemati-
cal definition of type fonts, a definition that can be used on all machines
both now and in the future. The main significance of this approach is that
new symbols can readily be added in such a way that they are automatically
consistent with the old ones.
Of course it is necessary that the mathematically-defined letters be beauti-
ful according to traditional notions of aesthetics. Given a sequence of points
in the plane, what is the most pleasing curve that connects them? This
question leads to interesting mathematics, and one solution based on a novel
family of spline curves has produced excellent fonts of type in the author's
preliminary experiments. We may conclude that a mathematical approach
to the design of alphabets does not eliminate the artists who have been
doing the job for so many years; on the contrary, it gives them an exciting
new medium to work with.
I will be speaking today about work in progress, instead of completed

research; this was not my original intention when I chose the subject of this
lecture, but the fact is I couldn't get my computer programs working in time.
Fortunately it is just as well that I don't have a finished product to describe to
you today, because research in mathematics is generally much more interest-
ing while you're doing it than after it's all done. I will try therefore to convey
Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, given under the auspices of the American Mathematical Society,
January 4,1978; received by the editors February 10,1978.
The research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant MCS72-03752 A03,
and by the Office of Naval Research contract N00014-76-C-0330. Reproduction in whole or in
part is permitted for any purpose of the United States Government.
1979 American Mathematical Society
0002-9904/79/0000-0117/$10.00
337
J X = =b V l S =fc y/\{ada"){aaa" I call this ineffective part of xe "innocuous" 1
(5) <P(ZI> x2, , xm -yi> yi, >
1 there correspond two quadric forms each contain 1 validate the fundamental proposition 1
in which the <pa are polynomials in y\, y*, , j
has been considered recently by W. D. MA
1 as known systems it will be convenient to use s usual algebraic elimination theory to the p<
1 mental cubic, due to HESSE.*
$ ( # i , x2, , xm:yn) would be found fo which was proved above (P. 4) for effective val 1
Referred to an inflexional triangle, the equati $ ( 0 , 0 , , 0 : yn) would be,say, of degreep. ineffective part of xe is innocuous is clear: it, as I
theorem to $ (art, x2, , Xm : yn), therefore, that the variation of xe does not take place in it I
(3) c = 3c + a^-f-a-f Gmxp degree p would appear. This is not in general t D. 3. But this consideration leads to the defin J
is sought in this paper, as may readily be sho of x. By this I mean the collection of values wl 1
The polynomials <pa may have roots for which i. e., I
[ (4) aval = (ypl + y2xl+y.&)+2*1(1/^
six planes yi+yu = 0, each counted three tim of systems of division algebras. The next sysfc z = et9z s (eiezlf ...,e"z.), 0 g 6 g 2TT,
type yi y2 y$ y = 0, each counted twice. of order p2q2 over F with the basal units iajbkc (
We have seen that any point on the line yx + with an irreducible equation of degree pqy three
c: C" is called a Reinhardt circular set if along w I
image in (X) the whole line Xt + Xt = 0, X3 rational functions 6(i) and ^(t) with coeflicie
in (y) meets the line in one point, its image 4 co iterative 6q(i) of 6{i) is i, and likewise 4/p(i) = i )eE also the set 1
the system si has also the three lines of this typ by { z | | 2 k | | z 2 | , * = U , . . . , n }
12. Algebraic procedure. The plane coi ek[4,']=y[ek(i)] <*-o,i, , q-i
and the vertex ( 1 , 0, 0, 0) has the equation bounded closed subset of C , unisolvent with respec 1
The complete multiplication table of the un The function b(z) being defined and lower semic 1
associative law from
Since (y) and (?/) both satisfy this equation we
FIGURE 1. A sequence of typographical styles in the AMS Transactions'.

(a) vol 1 (1900), p. 2; (b) vol 13 (1912), p. 135; (c) vol 23 (1922), p. 216;
(d) vol 25 (1923), p. 10; (e) vol 28 (1926), p. 207; (f) vol 105 (1962), p. 340;
The set Nt is nowhere dense in Zx and thus Np\ The algebra P is nearly simple if and only if tbi
For each ? e YN we must prove that/ c satisfy (a) N is spanned by , , an~ , b.9
*-l
be the unique projection in {Pd\de D} such that / = l ' - , &
This element is of lower length. I t follows there the algebra (EsfE)PQ is finite and homogeneoi (b) Either n- k = char F wr/A & et/e or n
i = 1, ;k. Hence, (a) yields that n XA> A onal abelian projections ElfE29.**9En such that
Now r* ^ 0, by the minimality of k, and 2A*5 (1 ^7, k^ri) be partial isometric operators in (Es4 Proof. By Theorem 5-5, there are elements
which we deduce that 2 X a * = 0. But the ai a (1) UjkUlm=8mjUlk9 where 8 is the Kronecker dt , , an~ , b^ , &. Furthermore, A^. =
which is impossible since in particular X* = 1. (2) UÛkj; and for all i, j where each a , A., is in F. From t
THEOREM 7. Let R be a dense ring of linear t (3) U=Eh space of the space spanned by an~ , 6.,-
F be a maximal commutative subfield D. If RF for all 1 ^y, k, /, m ^. For each A in (Es/E)-P0, t Assume P is nearly simple. Then there is
tion of finite rank over Ft then R contains als* in ^ i P 0 such that show that each b. is in M. To do this, it is nee
:tions in GL(W) and ^ , a, p G as coordinate
3
if C, i.e. :onverges pathwise to Xx, and uniformly for t G
ined by the respective bases chosen above. If a, ?
0 = 0 for every x G A for which x(Q) = 0}. for which Xt is the (last) minimum of Y\ let 1JX,
jnction of Ap is the minor of |g<,-| determined by
dues of 7 X , and Tx the interjump times for Yx
columns J3(l),..., (/>). The coordinate ring of or mA is equivalent to the one induced by the st an / such that Yx = Tx = oo. Notice that Y$ l
kafi together with \/dtt\haP\, while that of GL(W)
id that as e - 0, ^ converges to Ix = inf, *, x . Le
Dgether with l/det|g^|. The coordinate functions
ts of (oo, oo). Then, for example, if / > 1 O
, so to show Ap is a morphism it suffices to show {\x(z)\: x G A, M < 1 and x(w) = 0}.
niai in gy and l/detjg^. For this, the following
o
present the open unit disk in the complex plane, C, -* e 2?,yfix+Jk- YX G c,rcx+* G A t f > Q > /}
t polydisk in ?2-dinjensional complex space C". Tn G ,4,:\ G B , ^ - y,x G c ^ eD,N>Q
haracter of GHW) is an integral power of the loundary of Z)n, i.e.
FIGURE 1 [continued]:
(g) vol 114 (1965), p. 216; (h) vol 125 (1966), p. 38; (i) vol 169 (1972), p. 232;
(j) vol 179 (1973), p. 314; (k) vol 199 (1974), p. 370; (1) vol 225 (1977), p. 372.
CO
CO
to
340 D. E. KNUTH
in this lecture why I am so excited about the project on which I am currently

working.
My talk will be in two parts, based on two different meanings of its title.
First I will speak about mathematical typography in the sense of typography
as the servant of mathematics: the goal here is to communicate mathematics
effectively by making it possible to publish mathematical papers and books of
high quality, without excessive cost. Then I will speak about mathematical
typography in the sense of mathematics as the servant of typography: in this
case we will see that mathematical ideas can make advances in the art of
printing.
Preliminary examples. To set the stage for this discussion I would like to
show you some examples by which you can "educate your eyes" to see
mathematics as a printer might see it. These examples are taken from the
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, which began publication
in 1900; by now over 230 volumes have been published. I took these volumes
from the library shelves and divided them into equivalence classes based on
what I could perceive to be different styles of printing: two volumes were
placed into the same class if and only if they appeared to be printed in the
same style. It turns out that twelve different styles can be distinguished, and it
will be helpful for us to look at them briefly.
The first example (Figure la) comes from p. 2 of Transactions volume 1; I
have shown only a small part of the page in order to encourage you to look at
the individual letters and their positions rather than to read the mathematics.
This typeface has an old-fashioned appearance, primarily because the upper
case letters and the taller lower case ones like 'A* and 'k9 are nearly twice as
tall as the other lower case letters, and this is rarely seen nowadays. Notice
the style of the italic letter 'x\ the two strokes having a common segment in
the middle. The subscripts and superscripts are set in rather small type.
This style was used in volumes 1 to 12 of the Transactions, and also in the
first 21 pages of volume 13. Then page 22 of volume 13 introduced a more
modern typeface (Figure lb). In this example the subscripts are still in a very
small font, and unfortunately the Greek a here is almost indistinguishable
from an italic V . Notice also that the printer has inserted more space before
and after parentheses than we are now accustomed to. During the next few
years the spacing within formulas evolved gradually but the typefaces re-
mained essentially the same up through volume 24: with one exception.
The exception was volume 23 in 1922 (Figure lc), which in my opinion has
the most pleasing appearance of all the Transactions volumes. This modern
typeface is less condensed, making it more pleasant to read. The italic letters
have changed in style too, not quite so happilynote the 'x\ for example,
which is not as nice as beforebut by and large one has a favorable
impression when paging through this volume. Such quality was not without
its cost, however; according to a contemporary report in the AMS Bulletin
[45, p. 100], the Transactions came out 18 months late at the time! Perhaps
this is why the Society decided to seek yet another printer.
In order to appreciate the next change, let's look quickly at two excerpts
from the Bulletin relating to the very first Gibbs lecture (Figure 2). The
MATHEMATICAL TYPOGRAPHY 341
THE JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS LECTURESHIP

The Council of the Society has sanctioned the establishment
of an honorary lectureship to be known as the Josiah Willard
Gibbs Lectureship. The lectures are to be of a popular nature
on topics in mathematics or its applications, and are to be
given by invitation under the auspices of the Society. They
will be held annually or at such intervals as the Council may
direct. It is expected that the first lecture will be delivered
in New York City during the winter of 1923-24, and a com-
mittee has been authorized to inaugurate the lectures by
choosing the first speaker and making the necessary arrange-
ments.
R. G. D. RICHARDSON,
Secretary.
T H E FIRST JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS LECTURE

The first Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture was delivered
under the auspices of this Society on February 29. 1924,
by Professor M. I. Pupin, of Columbia University, in the
auditorium of the Engineering Societies' Building, New York
City. A large and distinguished audience was present,
including, besides members of the Society, many physicists,
chemists, and engineers who had been invited to attend.
In introducing the speaker, President Veblen spoke as
follows:
"In instituting the Willard Gibbs Lectures, the American
Mathematical Society has recognized the dual character of
mathematics. On the one hand, mathematics is one of the
essential emanations of the human spirit,a thing to be
valued in and for itself, like art or poetry. Gibbs made
FIGURE 2. A time of transition.

(Excerpts from the AMS Bulletin 29 (1923), p. 385; 30 (1924), p. 289. )
342 D. E. KNUTH
preliminary announcement in 1923 appeared in the modern typeface used

during that year, but the letter shapes in the report of the first lecture in 1924
were very cramped and stilted. The upper case letters in the title are about the
same, but the lower case letters in the text are completely different.
This same style appeared in volume 25 of the Transactions (Figure Id),
which incidentally was set in Germany in order to reduce the cost of printing.
Note that the boldface letters and the italic letters in this example are actually
quite beautifuland we're back to the good old style of V againso the
mathematical formulas looked great while the accompanying text was crowd-
ed. Fortunately only three volumes were published in this style.
A new era for the Transactions began in 1926, when its printing was taken
over by the Collegiate Press in Menasha, Wisconsin. Volumes 28 through 104
were all done in the same style, covering 36 years from 1926 to 1961,
inclusive, and this style (Figure le) was used also in the American Mathe-
matical Monthly. In general the modern typefaces were quite satisfactory, but
there was also a curious anomaly: Italic letters used in subscripts and
superscripts of mathematical formulas were in a different style from those
used on the main line! For example, notice the two fc's in the first displayed
formula of Figure le: the larger one has a loop, so it is topologically different
from the smaller one. Similarly you can see that the/? in kp is quite different
from the p in p2. There are no JC'S in this example, but if you look at other
pages you will find that the style of x that I like best appears only in
subscripts and superscripts. I can't understand why this discrepancy was
allowed to persist for so many years.
Another period of typographic turmoil for the Transactions began with
volume 105 in 1962. This volume, which was typeset in Israel, introduced a
switch to the Times Roman typeface (Figure If); an easy way to recognize the
difference quickly is to look at the shading on the letter "o", since it now is
somewhat slanted; in the previously used fonts this letter always was more
symmetrical, as if it were drawn with a pen held horizontally, but in Times
Roman it clearly has an oblique stress as if it were drawn by a right-handed
penman. Note that the three &'s are topologically the same in the displayed
equation here; but for some reason the two subscript A:'s are of different sizes.
Many of the Times Italic letters have a somewhat different style than readers
of the Transactions had been accustomed to, and I personally think that this
font tends to make formulas look more crowded. Actually the changeover to
Times Roman and Times Italic wasn't complete; the italic letter g still had its
familiar shape, perhaps because the new shape looked too strange to
mathematicians.
Volumes 105 through 124 were all done in this style, except for a brief
interruption: In volumes 114, 115, and 116 the shading on the 'S was
symmetrical and the &'s had loops (Figure lg). Another style was used for
volumes 125-168 (Figure lh): again Times Roman was the rule, even in the
g's, except for subscripts and superscripts which were in the style I prefer; for
example, compare the s and &'s. (These latter volumes were typeset in Great
Britain.)
A greatly increased volume of publication, together with the rising salaries
of skilled personnel, was making it prohibitively expensive to use traditional
methods of typesetting, and the Society eventually had to resort to a fancy

form of typewriter composition that could simply be photographed for
printing. This unfortunate circumstance made volumes 169-198 of the
Transactions look like Figure li, except for volumes 179, 185, 189, 192, 194,
and 198, which were done in a far better (yet not wholly satisfactory) style
that can be distinguished from Figure If by the italic g's. Figure lj was
composed on a computer using a system developed by Lowell Hawkinson
and Richard McQuillin; this was one of the fruits of an AMS research project
supported by the National Science Foundation [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].
Computer typesetting of mathematics was still somewhat premature at the
time, however, and another kind of "cold copy" made its appearance in
volumes 199 through 224an "IBM Compositor" was used, except for
volumes 208 and 211 which reverted to the Varityper style of Figure li. The
new alphabet was rather cramped in appearance, and some words were even
more crowded than the others (see Figure Ik). At this point I regretfully
stopped submitting papers to the American Mathematical Society, since the
finished product was just too painful for me to look at. Similar fluctuations of
typographical quality have appeared recently in all technical fields, especially
in physics where the situation has gotten even worse. (The history of publi-
cation at the American Society of Civil Engineers has been discussed in an
interesting and informative article by Paul A. Parisi [44].)
Fortunately things are now improving. Beginning with volume 225, which
was published last year, the Transactions now looks like Figure 11; like Figure
lj, it is computer composed, and the Times Roman typeface is now somewhat
larger. I still don't care for this particular style of italic letters, and there are
some bugs needing to be ironed out such as the overlap between lines shown
in this example; but it is clear that the situation is getting better, and perhaps
some day we will once again be able to approach the quality of volumes 23
and 24.
Computer-assisted composition. Perhaps the main reason that the situation
is improving is the fact that computers are able to manipulate text and
convert it into a form suitable for printing. Experimental systems of this kind
have been in use since the early 1960s (cf. the book by Barnett [10]), and now
they are beginning to come of age. Within another ten years or so, I expect
that the typical office typewriter will be replaced by a television screen
attached to a keyboard and to a small computer. It will be easy to make
changes to a manuscript, to replace all occurrences of one phrase by another
and so on, and to transmit the manuscript either to the television screen, or to
a printing device, or to another computer. Such systems are already in use by
most newspapers, and new experimental systems for business offices actually
will display the text in a variety of fonts [26]. It won't be long before these
machines change the traditional methods of manuscript preparation in
universities and technical laboratories.
Mathematical typesetting adds an extra level of complication, of course.
Printers refer to mathematics as "penalty copy", and one of America's
foremost typographers T. L. De Vinne wrote that "[even] under the most
favorable conditions algebra will be troublesome." [17, p. 171.] The problem
344 D. E. KNUTH
Formula Type C Type B Type T
$fl$s2$t 1 over 2 1 \over 2
*gqH2 theta sup 2 \thetaT2
$rf(x'i)$t sqrt{f(x sub i )} \sqrt{f(x4)}
FIGURE 3. Three ways to describe a formula.

used to be that the two-dimensional formulas required complicated position-
ing of individual metal pieces of type; but now this problem reduces to a
much simpler one, namely that two-dimensional formulas need to be repre-
sented as a one-dimensional sequence of instructions for transmission to the
computer.
One-dimensional languages for mathematical formulas are now familiar in
programming languages such as FORTRAN, but a somewhat different ap-
proach is needed when all of the complexities of typesetting are considered.
In order to show you the flavor of languages for mathematical typesetting, I
will briefly describe the three reasonably successful systems known to me.
The first, which I will call Type C, is typical of the commercially available
systems now used to typeset mathematical journals (cf. [12]). The second,
which I will call Type B, was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories and
has been used to prepare several books and articles including the article that
introduced the system [27]. The third, which I will call Type T, is the one I
am presently developing as part of the system I call TEX [29].l
Figure 3 shows how three simple formulas would be expressed in these
three languages. The Type C language uses $f . . . $s . . . $t for fractions, *g
for "the next character is Greek", q for the Greek letter theta, " for
superscripts, $ r . . . $t for square roots and ' for subscripts. The Type B
language is more mnemonic, using "over", "theta", "sup", "sqrt", and "sub"
together with braces for grouping when necessary. The Type T language is
similar but it does not make use of "reserved words"; a special character \ is
used before any nonstandard text. This means that spaces can be ignored,
while they need to be inserted in just the right places in the Type B language;
for example, the space after the "/" is important in the example shown,
otherwise (X) would become (xt) according to the Type B rules. Another
reason for the \ delimiter in Type T is that it becomes unnecessary to match
each text item against a stored dictionary, and it is possible to use "sup" to
mean supremum instead of superscript. The special symbols \ { } f | in Type
T can be changed to any other characters if desired; although these five
'This has no connection with a similarly-named system recently announced by Honeywell

Information Systems, or with another one developed by Digital Research. In my language, the
T, E, and X are Greek letters and TEX is pronounced "tech", following the Greek words for art
and technology.
symbols don't appear on conventional typewriters, they are common on

computer terminal keyboards.
Incidentally, computer typesetting brings us some good news: It is now
quite easy to represent square roots in the traditional manner with radical
signs and vincula, so we won't have to write x 1 / 2 when we don't want to.2
None of these languages makes it possible to read complex formulas as
easily as in the two-dimensional form, but experience shows that it is not
difficult for untrained personnel to learn how to type them. According to [12],
"Within a few hours (a few days at most) a typist with no math or typesetting
background can be taught to input even the most complex equations." And
the Type B authors [27] report that "the learning time is short. A few minutes
gives the general flavor, and typing a page or two of a paper generally
uncovers most of the misconceptions about how it works." Thus it will be
feasible for both typists and mathematicians to prepare papers in such a
language, without investing a great deal of effort in learning the system. The
only real difficulties arise when preparing tables that involve tricky align-
ments.
Once such systems become widespread, authors will be able to prepare
their papers and see exactly how they will look when printed. Everyone who
writes mathematical papers knows that his intentions are often misunderstood
by the printer, and corrections to the galley proofs have a nontrivial probabil-
ity of introducing further errors. Thus, in the words of three early users of the
Bell Labs' system, "the moral seems clear. If you let others do your typeset-
ting, then there will be errors beyond your control; if you do your own, then
you have only yourself to blame." [1] Personally, I can't adequately describe
how wonderful it feels when I now make a change to the manuscript of my
book, as it is stored in the Stanford computer, since I know that the change is
immediately in effect; it never will go through any middlemen who might
misunderstand my intention.
Perhaps some day a typesetting language will become standardized to the
point where papers can be submitted to the American Mathematical Society
from computer to computer via telephone lines. Galley proofs will not be
necessary, but referees and/or copy editors could send suggested changes to
the author, and he could insert these into the manuscript, again via telephone.
Of course I am hoping that if any language becomes standard it will be my
TEX language. W e l l . . . perhaps I am biased, and I know that TEX provides
only small refinements over what is available in other systems. Yet several
dozen small refinements add up to something that is important to me, and I
think such refinements might prove important to other people as well.
Therefore I'd like to spend the next few minutes explaining more about TEX.
The TEX input language. TEX must deal with "ordinary" text as well as
mathematics, and it is designed as a unified system in which the mathematical
features blend in with the word-processing routines instead of being "tacked
on" to a conventional typesetting language. The main idea of TEX is to
2
(ADDED IN PROOF). I was pleased to find that this announcement was greeted with an
enthusiastic round of applause when I delivered the lecture.
346 D. E. KNUTH
construct what I call boxes. A character of type by itself is a box, as is a solid

black rectangle; and we use such "atoms" to construct more complex boxes
analogous to "molecules", by forming horizontal or vertical lists of boxes.
The final pages of text are boxes made out of lists of boxes made out of lists
of boxes, and so on down to the individual characters and black rectangles,
which are not decomposed further. For example, a typical page of a book is a
box formed from vertical lists of boxes representing lines of type, and these
lines of type are boxes formed from a horizontal list of boxes representing
individual letters. A mathematical formula breaks down into boxes in a
natural way; for example, the numerator and denominator of a fraction are
boxes, and so is the bar line between them (since it is a thin but solid black
rectangle). The elements of a rectangular matrix are boxes, and so on.
The individual boxes of a horizontal list or a vertical list are separated by a
special kind of elastic mortar which I call "glue". The glue between two boxes
has three component parts (x,y9 z) expressed in units of length:
the space component, x9 is the ideal or normal space desired between
these boxes;
the stretch component, y9 is the amount of extra space that is
tolerable;
the shrink component, z, is the amount of space that may be removed
if necessary.
Suppose the list contains n + 1 boxes B09 Bl9 . . . , Bn separated by n globs of
glue having specifications (xl9yl9 zx)9 . . . , (xn9yn9 zn). When this list is made
into a box, we set the glue according to the desired final size of the box. If the
final size is to be larger than we would obtain with the normal spacing
x{ + + xn, we increase the space proportional to the y9s so that the
actual space between boxes is
xx + tyX9...9xn + tyn
for some appropriate / > 0. On the other hand if the desired final size
must be smaller, we decrease the space to
X\ *Zj, , Xn *ZW,
in proportion to the individual shrinkages z,. In the latter case t is not allowed
to become greater than 1; the glue will never be smaller than x z, although
it might occasionally become greater than x + y. Once the glue has been set,
the box is rigid and never changes its size again.
Consider, for example, a normal line of text, which is a list of individual
character boxes. The glue between letters of a word will have x = y = z = 0,
say, meaning that this word always has the letters butting against each other;
but the glue between words might have x equal to the width of the letter V,
and>> = x9 and z = \x9 meaning that the space between words might expand
or shrink. The spaces after punctuation marks like periods and commas might
be allowed to stretch at a faster rate but to shrink more slowly.
An important special case of this glue concept occurs when we have
"infinite" stretchability. Suppose the x and z components are zero, but the y
component is extremely large, say y is one mile long. If such an element of
glue is placed at the left of a list of boxes, the effect will be to put essentially
all of the expansion at the left, therefore the boxes will be right-justified so
that the right edge will be flush with the margin. Similarly if we place such
infinitely stretchable glue at both ends of the list, the effect will be to center
the line. These common typographic operations therefore turn out to be
simple special cases of the general idea of variable glue, and the computer can
do its job more elegantly since it is dealing with fewer primitives. Incidentally
you will notice from this example that glue is allowed to appear at the ends of
a list, not just between boxes; actually it is also possible to have glue next to
glue, and boxes next to boxes, so that a list of boxes really is a list of boxes
and glue mixed in any fashion whatever. I didn't mention this before, because
for some reason it seems easier to explain the idea first in the case when boxes
alternate with glue.
The same principles apply to vertical lists. For example, the glue which
appears above and below a displayed equation will tend to be stretchable and
shrinkable, but the glue between lines of text will be calculated so that
adjacent base lines will be uniformly spaced when possible. You can imagine
how the concept of glue allows you to do special tricks like backspacing (by
letting x be negative), in a natural manner.
Line division. One of the more interesting things a system like TEX has to
do is to divide up a paragraph into individual lines so that each line is about
the right length. The traditional way to do this, which is still used on today's
computer typesetting systems, is to make the best possible line division you
can whenever you come to the right margin, but once this line has been
output you never reconsider ityou start the next line with no memory of
what has come before. Actually it often happens that one could do better by
moving a short word down from one line to the next, but the problem is that
you don't know what the rest of the paragraph will be like when you have
only looked at one line's worth.
The TEX system will introduce a new approach to the problem of line
division, in which the end of a paragraph does influence the way the first lines
are broken; this will result in more even spacing and fewer hyphenated
words. Here is how it works: First we convert the line division problem to a
precisely-defined mathematical problem by using TEX's glue to introduce the
concept of "badness". When a horizontal list of boxes has a certain natural
width w (based on the width of its boxes and the space components of its
glue), a certain stretchability y (the sum of the stretch components) and a
certain shrinkability z (the sum of the shrinkages), the badness of setting the
glue to make a box of width W is defined to be 1 + 100*3 in our previous
notation; more precisely, it is
1, if W - w9
l + lOolW"w\9 i!W>w,
1 + l00lW"zW\\ iw-z<W<w>
infinite, if W < w z.
348 D. E. KNUTH
Thus if the desired width W is near the natural width w, or if there is a lot of
stretchability and shrinkability, the badness rating is very small; but if W is
much greater than w and there isn't much ability to stretch, we have a lot of
badness. Furthermore we add penalty points to the badness rating if the line
ends at a comparatively undesirable place; for example, when a word needs
to be hyphenated, the badness goes up by 50, and an even worse penalty is
paid if we have to break up mathematical formulas.
The line division problem may now be stated as follows. "Given the text of
a paragraph and the set of all allowable places to break it between lines, find
breakpoints which minimize the sum of the squares of the badnesses of the
resulting lines." This definition is quite arbitrary, of course, but it seems to
work. Preliminary experiments show that the same choice of breakpoints is
almost always found when simply minimizing the sum of the individual
badnesses rather than the sum of their squares, but it seems wise to minimize
the sum of squares as a precautionary measure since this will also tend to
minimize the maximum badness.
Just stating the line division problem in mathematical terms doesn't solve
it, of course; we need to have a good way to find the desired breakpoints. If
there are n permissible places to break (including all spaces between words
and all possible hypenations), there are 2n possible ways to divide up the
paragraph, and we would never have time to look at them all. Fortunately
there is a technique that can be used to reduce the number of computational
steps to order n2 instead of 2n; this is a special case of what Richard Bellman
calls "dynamic programming." Let (j) be the minimum sum of badness
squares for all ways to divide the initial text of the paragraph up to
breakpoints, including a break aty, and let b{ij) be the badness of a line
that runs from breakpoint / to breakpoint j . Let breakpoint 0 denote the
beginning of the paragraph; and let breakpoint n + 1 be the end of the
paragraph, with infinitely expandable glue inserted just before this final
breakpoint. Then
/(0) = 0;
SU) = omin ((/) + b{ijf), for 1 < j < n + 1.
The computation of /(l), . . . , ( + 1) can be done in order n2 steps, and
S(n + 1) will be the minimum possible sum of badnesses squared. By remem-
bering the values of i at which the minima occurred for each j , we can find
breakpoints that give the best line divisions, as desired.
In practice we need not test extremely unlikely breakpoints; for example,
there is rarely any reason to hyphenate the very first word of a paragraph.
Thus it turns out that this dynamic programming method can be further
improved to an algorithm whose running time is almost always of order n
instead of n2, and comparatively few hyphenations will need to be tried.
Incidentally, the problem of hyphenation itself leads to some interesting
mathematical questions, but I don't have time to discuss them today. (Cf. [41]
and the references in that paper.)
The idea of badness ratings applies in the vertical dimension as well as in
the horizontal; in this case we want to avoid breaking columns or pages in a
bad manner. For example, penalty points are given for splitting a paragraph
between pages after a hyphenation, or for dividing it in such a way that only
one of its linesa so-called "widow" lineappears on a page. The placement
of illustrations, tables, and footnotes is also facilitated by formulating
appropriate rules of placement in terms of badness.
There is more to TEX, including for example some facilities for handling
the rather intricate layouts often needed to typeset tables without having to
calculate column widths; but I think I have described the most important
principles of its organization. During the next few months I plan to write the
computer programs for TEX in such a way that each algorithm is clearly
explained and so that the system can be implemented on many different
computers without great difficulty; then I intend to publish the programs in a
book so that everyone who wants to can use them.
Entr'acte. I said at the beginning that this talk would be in two parts,
discussing both the ways that typography can help mathematics and that
mathematics can help typography. So far we have seen a little of both, but the
mathematics has been comparatively trivial. In the remainder of my lecture I
would like to discuss what I believe is a much more significant application of
mathematics to typography, namely to the specification of the letter shapes
themselves. A more accurate way to describe the two parts of my lecture
would be to say that the first part was about TEX, a system which takes
manuscripts and converts them into specifications about where to put each
character on each page; and the second part will be about another system I'm
working on called METAFONT, which generates the characters themselves,
for use in the inkier parts of the printing business.
Before I get into the second part of my lecture I need to discuss recent
developments in printing technology. The most reliable way to print mathe-
matics books of high quality during the past several decades has been to use
the monotype process3 which casts characters in hot lead, together with hand
operations for complex built-up formulas. When I watched this process being
applied to my own books several years ago, I was surprised to learn that the
lead type was used to print only one copy; this master copy was then
photographed, and the real printing took place from the photographic plates.
This somewhat awkward sequence of steps was justified because it was the
best way known to give good results. During the 1960s, however, hot lead
type was replaced for many purposes by devices like the Photon machine
used to prepare the printed programs for this lecture; in this case the process
is entirely photographical, since the letter shapes are stored as small negatives
on a rotating disk, and the plates needed for printing are obtained by
exposing the film after transforming the characters into the proper size and
position with mirrors and lenses (cf. [10]). Such machines are limited by slow
speed and the difficulties of adding new characters.
"Third-generation" typesetting equipment. More recent machines, such as
the one used to prepare the current volumes of the Transactions, have
replaced these "analog" processes by a "digital" one. The new idea is to
3
Actually the Monotype Corporation now manufactures digital photosetting equipment as well
as the traditional 'monotype' machines.
350 D. E. KNUTH
divide the page or the photographic negative into millions of tiny rectangles,
like a piece of graph paper or like a television screen but with a much higher
resolution of about 1000 lines per inch. For each of the tiny "pixels" in such a
raster patternthere are about a million square pixels in every square
inchthe typesetting machine decides whether it is to be black or white, and
the black ones are exposed on the photographic plate by using a very
precisely controlled electron beam or laser beam. Since these machines have
few moving parts and require little or no mechanical motion, they can operate
at very high speeds even though they are exposing only a tiny bit of the film
at any time.
Stating this another way, the new printing equipment essentially treats each
page of a book as a huge matrix of 0's and l's, with ink to be placed in the
positions that are 1 while the 0 positions are to be left blank. It's like the
flashcards at a football stadium, although on a much grander scale. The total
job of a system like TEX now becomes one of converting an author's
manuscript into a gigantic bit matrix.
The first question we must ask, of course, is, "What happens to the quality?"
Clearly a television picture is no match for a photograph, and the digital
typesetting machines would be quite unsatisfactory if their output looked
inferior to the results obtained with metal type. In matters like this, I have to
confess being somewhat of a stickler and a perfectionist; for example, I refuse
to eat margarine instead of butter, and I have never heard an electronic organ
that sounds even remotely as beautiful as a pipe organ. Therefore I was quite
skeptical about digital typography, until I saw an actual sample of what was
done on a high quality machine and held it under a magnifying glass: It was
impossible to tell that the letters were generated with a discrete raster! The
reason for this is not that our eyes can't distinguish more than 1000 points per
inch; in appropriate circumstances they can. The reason is that particles of
ink can't distinguish such fine detailsyou can't print the edge of an ink line
that zigzags 1000 times on the diagonal of a square inch, the ink will round
off the edges. In fact the critical number seems to be more like 500 than 1000.
Thus the physical properties of ink cause it to appear as if there were no
raster at all.
It now seems clear that discrete raster-based printing devices will soon
make the other machines obsolete for nearly all publishing activity. Thus in
future days the fact that Gutenberg and others invented movable type will
not be especially relevant; it will merely be a curious historical fact that
influenced history for only about 500 years. The ultimately relevant thing will
be mathematics: the mathematics of matrices of 0's and l's!
Semiphilosophical remarks. I have to tell the next part of the story from my
personal point of view. As a combinatorial mathematician, I really identify
with matrices of 0's and l's, so when I learned last spring about such printing
machines it was impossible for me to continue what I was doing; I just had to
take time off to explore the possibilities of the new equipment. My motivation
was also increased by the degradation of quality I had been observing in
technical journals; and furthermore the publishers of my books on computer
programming had tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to produce the second
edition of volume 2 in the style of the first edition without using the
rapidly-disappearing hot lead process. It appeared that my books would soon

have to look as bad as the journals! When I saw that these problems could all
be solved by appropriate computer programming, I couldn't resist trying to
find a solution by myself.
One of the most important factors in my motivation was the knowledge
that the problem would be solved once and for all, if I could find a purely
mathematical way to define the letter shapes and convert them to discrete
raster patterns. Even though new printing methods are bound to be devised in
the future, possibly even before I finish volume seven of the books I'm
writing, any new machines are almost certain to be based on a high precision
raster; and although the precision of the raster may change, the letter shapes
can stay the same forever, once they are defined in a machine-independent
form. My goal was therefore to give a precise description of the shapes of all
the symbols I would need.
I looked at the way fonts of type are being digitized at several places in
different parts of the world; it is basically done by taking existing fonts and
copying them using sophisticated camera equipment and computer programs,
together with manual editing. But this seemed instinctively wrong to me,
partly because the sophisticated equipment wasn't readily available in our
laboratory at Stanford, and partly because the copying of copyrighted fonts is
of questionable legality, but mostly because I felt that the whole idea of
making a copy was not penetrating to the heart of the problem. It reminded
me of the anecdote I had once heard about slide rules in Japan. According to
this story, the first slide rule ever brought to the Orient had a black speck of
dirt on it; so for many years all Japanese slide rules had a useless black spot
in this same position! The story is probably apocryphal, but the point is that
we should copy the substance rather than the form. I felt that the right
question to ask would not be "How should this font of type be copied?" but
rather: "If the great type designers of the past were alive today, how would
they design fonts for the new equipment?" I didn't expect to be capable of
finding the exact answer to this question, of course, but I did feel that it
would lead me in the right direction, so I began to read about the history of
type design.
Well, this is a most fascinating subject, but I can't talk much about it in a
limited time. Two of the first things I read were autobiographical notes by
two well-known 20th century type designers, Hermann Zapf [51] and Frederic
W. Goudy [20], and I was especially interested by some of Zapf's remarks:
With the beginning of the 'sixties... I was stimulated by this new field
[photocomposing]... The type-designeror better, let us start calling him
the alphabet designerwill have to see his task and his responsibility more
than before in the coordination of the tradition in the development of
letterforms with the practical purpose and the needs of the advanced
equipment of today The new photocomposing systems using cathode-
ray tubes (CRT) or digital storage for the alphabet bring with them some
absolutely new technical problems, many more than did the past... [51, p.
71].
I have the impression that Goudy would not have been so sympathetic to
the new-fangled equipment, yet his book also gave helpful ideas.
352 D. E. KNUTH
(c)
FIGURE 4. Sixteenth century ruler-and-compass constructions for the letter B by
(a) Pacioli [42], (b) Torniello [48], and (c) Palatino [43].
(a) (b)
FIGURE 5. Two more B's, by Tory [49].
Mathematical type design. Fortunately the Stanford Library has a wonder-
ful collection of books about printing, and I had the chance to read many
rather rare source materials. I learned to my surprise that the idea of defining
letters mathematically is by no means new, it goes back to the fifteenth
century and it became rather highly developed in the early part of the
sixteenth. This was the time when there were Renaissance men who combined
mathematics with the real world, and in particular there was an interest in
FIGURE 6. Roman and italic letters designed for Louis XIV of France [24].
constructing capital letters with ruler and compass. The first person to do this
was apparently Felice Feliciano, about 1460, whose handwritten manuscript
in the Vatican Library was published 500 years later [19]. Feliciano was an
excellent calligrapher who wanted to put the principles of calligraphy on a
sound mathematical foundation. Several other fifteen-century authors made
similar experiments ([8] gives a critical summary of these early developments),
but the most notable work of this kind appeared in the early sixteenth
century.
The Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli, who had previously written the
most influential book on algebra at the time (one of the first algebra books
ever published), included an appendix on alphabets in his De Divina Propor-
tioned a book about geometry and the "golden section" which appeared in
1509. Another notable Italian work on the subject was published by Fran-
cesco Torniello in 1517 [48], [33]; Figure 4 illustrates the letter B as con-
structed by Pacioli, Torniello, and by Giovanbattista Palatino [43]. Palatino
was one of the best calligraphers of the century, and he did this work about
354 D. E. KNUTH
1550. Similar work appeared in Germany and France; the German book was
probably the most famous and influential, it was Albrecht Drer's Underwey-
sung der Messung [18], a manual of instruction in geometry for Renaissance
painters. The French book was also rather popular, it was Champ Fleury by
Geofroy Tory [49], the first royal printer of France and the man who
introduced accented letters into French typography. Figure 5 shows Tory's
two suggestions for the letter B. Of all these books I much prefer Torniello's,
since he was the only one who stated the constructions clearly and unambigu-
ously.
Apparently nobody carried this work further to lower case letters, numer-
als, or italic letters and other symbols, until more than 100 years later when
Joseph Moxon made a detailed study of some beautiful letters designed in
Holland [38]. The ultimate in refinement of this mathematical approach took
place shortly afterwards when Louis XIV of France commisioned the creation
of a Royal Alphabet. A commision of artists and typographers worked on
Louis's project for more than ten years beginning about 1690, and they made
elaborate constructions such as those shown in Figure 6 [24].
Thus it is clear that the mathematical definition of letter forms has a long
history. However, I must also report near-universal agreement among today's
scholars of typography that those efforts were a failure. At worst, the
ruler-and-compass letters have been called "ugly" and at best they are said to
be "deprived of calligraphic grace" [8]. The French designs were not really
followed faithfully by Phillipe Grandjean who actually cut Louis XIV's type,
nor by anybody else to date, and F. W. Goudy's reaction to this was: "God
be praised!" [20, p. 139]. Such strictly geometric letter forms were in fact
criticized already in the sixteenth century by Giovan Cresci, a noted scribe at
the Vatican Library and the Sistine Chapel. Here is what Cresci wrote in
1560:
I have come to the conclusion that if Euclid, the prince of geometry,
returned to this world of ours, he would never find that the curves of the
letters could be constructed by means of circles made with compasses. [16]
Well, Cresci was right. But fortunately there have been a few advances in
mathematics during the last 400 years, and we now have some other tricks up
our sleeves besides straight lines and circles. In fact, it is now possible to
prescribe formulas that match the nuances of the best type designers; and
perhaps a talented designer working with appropriate mathematical tools will
be able to produce something even better than we now have.
Defining good curves. Let's consider the following mathematical problem:
Given n points zl9 z2,..., zn in the plane, what is the most pleasing closed
curve that goes through them in the specified order zX9 z29... 9zn and then
returns to z{t To avoid degenerate situations we may assume that n is at least
4. This problem is essentially like the dot-to-dot puzzles that we give to young
children.
Of course it is not a well-posed mathematical problem, since I didn't say
what it means for a curve to be "most pleasing". Let's first postulate some
axioms that the most pleasing curve should satisfy.
PROPERTY 1 (INVARIANCE). If the given points are rotated, translated, or

expanded, the most pleasing curve will be rotated, translated, or expanded in
the same way. [In symbols: MPC(az{ + b, . . . , azn + b) =
aMPC(zl9 . . . ,zw) + b.]
PROPERTY 2 (SYMMETRY). Cyclic permutation of the given points does not
change the solution. [MPC(zl9 z 2 , . . . , zn) = MPC(z2,..., zn9 z{).]
PROPERTY 3 (EXTENSIONALITY). Adding a new point that is already on the
most pleasing curve does not change the solution. [If z is between zk and zk+l
on MPC(zl9 . . . , zn) then MPC(zl9 . . . , zk, z, zk+l9 . . . , zn) =
MPC(zl9...9zk9zk+l9...9zn).]
These properties are rather easy to justify on intuitive grounds. For example,
the extensionality property says that additional information won't lead to a
poorer solution.
The next property is not so immediately apparent, but I believe it is
important for the application I have in mind.
PROPERTY 4 (LOCALITY). Each segment of the most pleasing curve between
two of the given points depends only on those points and the ones im-
mediately preceding and following. [MPC(z{9 z 2 , . . . , zn) is composed of
MPC(zn9 Zj, z2, z3) from zx to z2, then MPC(zl9 z2, z3, z4) from z2 to
z 3 , . . . , then MPC(zn_l9 zn9 z z2) from zn to zv]
According to the locality property, changes to one part of a pattern won't
affect the other parts. This simplifies our search for the most pleasing curve,
because we need only solve the problem in the case of four given points; and
experience shows that it is also a great simplification when letters are being
designed, since individual portions of strokes can be dealt with separately.
Incidentally, Property 4 implies Property 2 (cyclic symmetry).
One way to satisfy all four of these properties is simply to let the most
pleasing curve consist of straight line segments. But this doesn't seem ade-
quately pleasing, so we postulate
PROPERTY 5 (SMOOTHNESS). There are no sharp corners in the most pleasing
curve. [MPC(zl9..., zn) is differentiable, under some parameterization.]
In other words, there is a unique tangent at every point of the curve.
The extensionality, locality, and smoothness properties taken together
imply, in fact, that the direction of the tangent at zk depends only on zk_l9 zk
and zk + l. For this tangent appears in two curves, the one from zk_x to zk and
the one from zk to zk+{9 hence we know that it depends only on
(z*-2> zk-\> zk> zk+\) a n d that it depends only on {zk_X9 zk9 zk+l9 zk+2). By the
extensionality property, we can assume that n is at least 5, so zk_2 is different
from z^+2 and the tangent must be independent of them both. We have
actually used only a very weak form of extensionality in this argument.
If we apply the full strength of the extensionality postulate, we obtain a
much stronger consequence, which is quite unfortunate: There is no good way
to satisfy Properties 1-5! For example, suppose we add one more axiom,
which is almost necessary in any reasonable definition of pleasing curves:
356 D. E. KNUTH
PROPERTY 6 (ROUNDNESS). If z z2, z3, z4 are consecutive points of a circle,

the most pleasing curve through them is that circle.
This property together with our previous observation about the tangent
depending only on three points completely determines the tangent at each of
our given points; namely, the tangent at zk is the tangent to the circle which
passes through zkx, zk, and zk+x. (Let's ignore for the moment the possibility
that these three points lie on a straight line.) Now the extensionality property
says that if z is any point between z, and z2 on the most pleasing curve for
Z j , . . . , z, we know the tangent direction at z, as long as z is not on the line
from z, to z2. But there is a unique curve starting at any z off this line and
having the specified tangents at each of its points, namely the arc of the circle
from z to z2 passing through z,: No matter where you start, off the straight
line, there is only one curve having the correct tangents. It follows that the
tangent at z2 depends only on zl9 z2, and the tangent at zX9 and this is
impossible.
The above argument proves that there is no way to satisfy Properties 3, 4,
5, and 6. A similar argument would show the impossibility for any reasonable
replacement for Property 6, since the tangents determined for all z between zx
and z2 will define a vector field in which there are unique curves through
essentially all of the points z, yet a two-parameter family of curves is required
between zx and z2 in order to allow sufficient flexibility in the derivatives
there.
So we have to give up one of these properties. The locality property is the
most suspicious one, but I mentioned before that I didn't want to give it up;
therefore the extensionality property has to go. This means that if we take the
most pleasing curve through z 1 ? . . . , zn and if we specify a further point z
actually on this curve between zk__x and zk, where the tangent at z is not the
same as the tangent to the circle from zk_x to z to zk, then the "most
pleasing" curve through these n + 1 points will be different. A possible virtue
is that we are encouraged not to specify too many points; a possible
drawback is that we may not be able to get the curves we want.
A practical approximation. Returning to the question of type design, our
goal is to specify a few points zk and to have a mathematical formula that
defines a pleasant curve through these points; such curves will be used to
define the shape of the character we are designing. Ideally it should also be
easy to compute the curves. I decided to use cubic equations
z
(0 = o + <M + ait2 + a3*3
where a0, a a2, a 3 are complex numbers and / is a real parameter. The
curves I am dealing with are cubic splines, namely piecewise cubic equations,
since a different cubic will be used in each interval between two of the given
points; however, the way I am determining the coefficients of these two
cubics is different from any of the methods known to me, in my limited
experience with the vast literature about splines. Perhaps my way to choose
the coefficients is more awkward than the usual ones; but I have obtained
good results with it, so I'm not ashamed to reveal the curious way I
proceeded.
In the first place, I decided that the cubic equation between zx and z2
should be determined completely by zx and z2 and the directions of the
tangents at zx and z2. We have already seen that these tangents are essentially
predetermined if Properties 4, 5, and 6 are to be valid, and I have also found
frequent occasion in type design when it was desirable to specify that a
certain tangent was to be made horizontal or vertical. Thus, my method of
computing a nice curve through a given sequence of points is first to compute
the tangent directions at each point, then to compute the cubics in each
interval based solely on the endpoints of that interval and on the desired
tangents there. By rotation and translation and scaling, according to Property
1, we can assume that the problem is to go in the complex plane from 0 to 1,
with given directions at the endpoints. The most general cubic equation which
does this is
z(t) = 3/ 2 - 2t3 + ret(l - tf~ se'ln2{\ - /),
and it remains to determine positive numbers r and s as appropriate functions
of 0 and <p.
In the second place, I realized that it was impossible to satisfy Property 6
with cubic splines, because you can't draw a circle as a cubic function of t.
But I wanted to be able to get curves that were as near to being circles as
possible, whenever four consecutive data points lay on a circle; the curves
should preferably be indistinguishable from circles as far as the human eye is
concerned. Therefore when 0 = <p I decided to choose r = s in such a way
that z{\) was precisely on the relevant circle, hoping that the curve between 0
and \ and between \ and 1 wouldn't veer too far away. Well, this turned out
to work extremely well: A little calculation, done with the help of a com-
puter,4 showed that the maximum deviation from a true circle occurs at the
point t = (3 V I )/6, and the relative error is negligibly small. For exam-
ple, if we take four points equally spaced at distance 1 from some center, the
spline curve defined by these points in the above manner stays between
distance 1 and distance 71/54 - 2 V 2 / 9 < 1.00055 from the center, an error
of less than one part in a thousand. If there are 8 points, the maximum error
is less than four parts per million; and if there are n points, the maximum
error goes to zero as l/n6.
(Changing the notation slightly, let
z{t) - 1 + {e* - 1)(3/2 - 2t3)
+ 4/7(1 - 0(1 - * ~ **')(sin \ ) / (l + cos | )

and f(i) - |z(0| 2 . Then
cos -z 1
'(/) = 8(sin2 | ) (t - l)t(2t - 1)(6/2 - 6/ + 1)
COS -r + 1
4
Thanks are due to the developers of the computer algebra system called MACSYMA at MIT,
and to the ARPA network which makes this system available for research work.
358 D. E. KNUTH
and
w e(
max \z
'4(^)1= 1+
55296
e 10
106168320
while min o < / < 1 |z(0| = *(0) = z{\) = z(l) = 1. The "two-point circle" has
m a x | z ( 0 | = V 2 8 / 2 7 = 1.01835, while the three-point circle has
max|z(0| = V325/324 = 1.001542, and the eight-point cicle has max|z(/)| =
1.0000042455.)
FIGURE 7.
Spline curves with
0 - 0 (5) 120 and <J> = 60
FIGURE 8.
Same as Figure 7
but adjusted so that
r' = max(|, r), s' = max(|, s).
Another case when a natural way to choose r and s suggests itself is when
9 + <p = 90; then the curve z(t) should be nearly the same as an ellipse
having the endpoints on its axes. (This boils down to requiring that (3/ 2 - 2/ 3
- 0/cos <p)t2(l - 0 - l)2 + (3/ 2 - 2/ 3 + (r/cos 9)t{\ - /)2)2 be approxi-
mately equal to 1.) So far therefore I knew that I wanted
r = s = when = <p;
i + cos e ' 1 + cos <p
4 cos 9 4 cos <p
r = (1 + cos 45)(cos 45) ' s = (1 + cos 45)(cos 45)
when 0 + (p = 90
So I tried the formulas
4 cos 9 4 cos <p
5 =
9 + <p'
1 + cos 1 ^ jfcos r J I
2
which fit both cases. However, this didn't give satisfactory results, especially
when 9 + <p approached 180. My second attempt was
4 sin<p 4sin0
r = 0 + <p /, . 0 + <p\ 9 + 9
! ( cos -y-jsm 2
and this has worked very well. Figure 7 shows the spline curves that result
from the above approach when <p = 60 and when 9 varies from 0 to 120 in
5 steps.
It can be proved that if 0 and <p are nonnegative and less than 180, the
cubic curve z(t) I have defined will never cross the straight lines at angles 0
and <p that meet the endpoints 0 and 1 respectively. This is a valuable
property in type design, since it can be used to guarantee that the curve won't
get out of bounds. However, I found that it also led to unsatisfactory curves
when one of 0 or <p was very small and the other was not, since this meant
that the curve z(t) would be very close to a straight line yet it would enter
that line from outside at a rather sharp angle. In fact, the angle 0 is not
infrequently zero, and this forces a straight line and a sharp corner at the
right endpoint. Therefore I changed the formulas by making sure that both r
and s are always \ or greater unless special exceptions are made; furthermore
I never let r or s exceed 4. Figure 8 shows the spline curves obtained under
the same conditions as Figure 7, but with s set to \ if the above formula calls
for any smaller value.
Using these techniques we obtain a system for drawing reasonably nice
curves, if not the most pleasing ones, and it is especially good at circles. If the
method gives the wrong tangent direction at some point, you can control this
by specifying two points very close together having the desired slope. I have
also included another way to modify the standard tangent directions, in-
tended to make the system as good at drawing ellipses as it is at drawing
circles: Before computing the splines I first shrink the entire figure in the
vertical direction by multiplying all the y coordinates by a given aspect ratio
(normally 1); then the splines are calculated, and the resulting shrunken
curves are stretched out again by dividing the y coordinates by the aspect
ratio.
Application to type design. Now let's take a closer look at what can be
drawn with a mathematical system like this. I suppose the natural thing to
show you would be the letters A to Z; but since this is a mathematical talk,
let's consider the digits 0 to 9 instead. (See Figure 9.) Incidentally, the way I
have arranged these numerals illustrates a fundamental distinction between a
mathematician and a printer: the mathematician puts 0 next to the 1, but the
printer always puts it next to the 9.
FIGURE
0123456789
9. Digits 0 to 9 drawn by the prototype METAFONT programs.
(Further refinements to these characters will be made before the font has its final form. )
Most of these digits are drawn by using another idea taken from the history
of typography, namely to imitate the calligrapher who uses pen and ink.
Consider first the numeral '3', for example. The computer program which
drew this symbol in Figure 9 can be paraphrased as follows. "First draw a dot
whose left boundary is \ of the way from the left edge to the right edge of the
type and whose bottom boundary is f of the way from the top to the bottom
of the desired final shape. Then take a hairline pen and, starting at the left of
the dot, draw the upward arc of an ellipse; after reaching the top, the pen
begins to grow in width, and it proceeds downward in another ellipse in such
a way that the maximum width occurs on the axis of the ellipse, with the right
360 D. E. KNUTH
0ABCDEFGHIJKLMN
OPQRSTUVWXYZH
'abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyzfffflffiffl aelikoe/ELfA
0123456789:;<=>? * ""*~
w
! %&'()*+--/ rAeAsnznronij
FIGURE 10. A font of 128 characters defined by METAFONT with
standard pen settings. (The accent characters will be
appropriately raised and centered over other letters
when used by TEX.)
edge of the pen of the way from the left edge to the right edge of the type.
Then the pen width begins to decrease to its original size again as the pen
traverses another ellipse taking it down to a position 48% of the way from the
top to the bottom of the desired final s h a p e . . . . "
Notice that instead of describing the boundary of the character, as the
renaissance geometers did, my METAFONT system describes the curve
traveled by the center of the pen, and the shape of this pen is allowed to vary
as the pen moves. The main advantage of this approach is that the same
definition readily yields a family of infinitely many related fonts of type, each
font being internally consistent. The change in pen size is governed by cubic
splines in a manner analogous to the motion of the pen's center. In order to
define the 20 or so different type fonts used in various places in my books, I
need for the most part to use only three kinds of pens, namely (i) a circular
pen, used for example to draw dots and at the base of the numeral '7'; (ii) a
horizontal pen, whose shape is an ellipse, the width being variable but the
height being constantly equal to the height of a hairline pensuch a pen is
used most of the time, and in particular to draw all of the numeral '3' except
for the dots; (iii) a vertical pen, analogous to the horizontal one, used for
example to draw the strokes at the bottom of the '2' and at the top of the '5'
and the '7'. For the fonts I am using, it was not necessary to use an oblique
pen (i.e., an ellipse that is tilted on its side) except to make the tilde accent for
Spanish AZ'S; but to produce fonts of type analogous to Times Roman, an
oblique pen would of course be used. If this system were to be extended to
Chinese and Japanese characters, I believe it would be best to add another
degree of freedom to the pen's motion, allowing an elliptical pen shape to
rotate as well as to change its width.
The digit '4' shows another aspect of the METAFONT system. Although
this character is fairly simple, consisting entirely of straight lines, notice that
the thick line has to be cut off at an angle at the top. In order to do this, there
are erasers as well as pens. First the computer draws a thick line all the way
from top to bottom, like the upper case letter 'I', then it takes an eraser which
erases everything to its left and comes down the diagonal stroke, then it takes
a hairline pen and finishes the diagonal stroke. Such an eraser is used also at
the top of the T and the bottom of the '2', etc.
Sometimes a simple spline seems to be inadequate to describe the proper
growth of pen width, so in a few cases I had to resort to describing the left
and right edges of the pen as separate curves, to be filled in afterwards. This
(C) (d)
FIGURE 11. The letter S as defined by (a) Pacioli [42]; (b) Torniello [48];
(c) Palatino [43]; (d) French commission under Jaugeon [24].
occurs for example in the main stroke of the numeral '2', whose edges are
defined by two splines having a specified tangent at the bottom and having
vertical slope at the right of the curve.
With these techniques I found that it was possible to define a decent-look-
ing complete font, containing a total of 128 characters, in about two months,
although it will still be necessary of course to do fine tuning when more trial
pages are typeset. (See Figure 10.) The most difficult symbol by far, at least
for me, was the letter S (and the numeral 8, which uses the same procedure);
in fact I spent three days and nights without sleep, trying to make the S look
right, before I got it. At one point I even felt it would be easier to rewrite all
my books without using any S"s! After the first day of discouraging trials, I
showed what I had to my wife, and she said, "Why don't you make it
S-shaped?"
Figure 11 shows how this problem was solved by Pacioli, Torniello,
Palatino, and the French academicians; but the letter doesn't look like a
362 D. E. KNUTH
modern S. Furthermore I think the engraver of the French S cheated a little

in rounding off some lines near the middleperhaps he used a French curve.
With my wife's assistance, I finally came up with a satisfactory solution,
somewhat like those used in the sixteenth century but generalized to ellipses.
Each boundary of each arc of my S curve is composed of an ellipse and a
straight line, determined by (i) the locations of the beginning and ending
points, (ii) the slope of the straight line, and (iii) the desired left extremity of
the curve. It took me three hours to derive the necessary formulas, and I think
Newton and Leibnitz would have enjoyed working on this problem. Figure 12
shows various trial 5"s drawn by this scheme with different slopes; I hope you
prefer the middle one, since it is the one I am actually using.
QQQQQQQ
uuijuuuij
FIGURE 12. Different S's obtained by varying the slope in the middle.
(This shows ^, f, | , 1, 5, , and 2 times the "correct" slope.)
Families of fonts. To extend the METAFONT system, one essentially
writes a computer program for the description of each character, in a special
language intended for describing pen and eraser strokes. My colleague R. W.
Gosper has observed that this is the opposite of Sesame Street: Instead of
"This program was brought to you by the letter S" we have "This letter S
was brought to you by a program." There are about 20 parameters to the
program, telling how big a hairline pen is, how wide it should be when
drawing straight or curved stem lines, and specifying the sizes and propor-
tions of various parts of the letters (the x-height, the heights of ascenders and
descenders, the set width, the length of serifs, and so forth). By changing
these parameters, we obtain infinitely many different styles of type, yet all of
them are related and they seem to blend harmoniously with each other.
For example, Figure 13 shows some of the possibilities. In Figure 13a we
have a conventional "modern" font in the tradition of Bodoni and Bell and
"Scotch Roman". Then Figure 13b shows a corresponding boldface, in which
the hairlines are slightly larger and the stem lines are substantially wider. By
making the hairlines and stem lines both the same size, and setting the serif
length to zero, we obtain a sans-serif font as shown in Figure 13c. All of these
examples are produced with the same programs defining the letter shapes;
only the parameters are being varied. Actually the particular font shown in
Figure 13c will have a different style of g, because the descenders are
especially short in this font, but I have shown this "g" in order to illustrate
the parametric variations. Figure 13d shows a boldface sans-serif style in
which the pen has an oval shape wider than it is tall; I find this style
especially pleasing, particularly because it came out by accidentI designed
the programs only so that two or three different fonts would look right, all the
others are free bonuses, and I had no idea that this one would be so nice.
With a suitable setting of the parameters, we can even imitate a typewriter
with its fixed width letters, as shown in Figure 13e. There is also a provision
(a) Mathematical Mathematical (b)

Typography Typography
(c) Mathematical Mathematical (d)

(e) Mathematical Mathematical (0

(g) MATHEMATICAL MATi-icmaticai (h)

TYPOGRAPHY Typography
Typography
FIGURE 13. Different styles of type obtained by varying the parameters to

METAFONT:
(a) Computer modern roman; (b) Computer modern bold;
(c) Computer modern san serif; (d) Computer modern sans serif
bold;
(e) Computer modern typewriter; (f) Computer modern
slanted roman;
(g) Computer modern roman with small caps; (h) Computer
modern roman with small caps and "small lower case";
(i) Computer modern funny.
to slant the letters as in Figure 13f; here the pen position is varied, but the
actual shape of the pen is not being slanted, so circles remain circles.
Another setting of the parameters leads to caps and small caps as shown in
Figure 13g; small caps are drawn with the pens and heights ordinarily used
for lower case letters, but controlled by the programs for upper case letters.
Figure 13h shows something printers have never seen before: this is what
happens when you draw lower case letters in the small caps style, and we
might call it "small lower case". It actually turns out to be one of the most
pleasing fonts of all, except that the dots are too large.
Finally, Figure 13i illustrates the variations you can get by giving weirder
settings to the parameters.
When I was an assistant professor at Caltech, the math department
secretaries used to send occasional "crank" visitors to my office, and I recall
one time when a man came to ask if anybody had calculated the value of m
364 D. E. KNUTH
"out to the end" yet. I tried to explain to him that m had been proved
irrational, but this didn't seem to sink in, so finally I showed him a table of TT
to 100,000 decimals and told him that the expansion hadn't ended yet. I wish
I could have had my typographical system ready at that time, so that I could
have shown him Figure 14!
3
FIGURE
2653 5 8 9 7 . . . w
14. Variation in height, width, and pen size.
Figure 14 illustrates another principle of type design, namely that different
sizes of type in the same style are not simply obtained from each other by
optical transformations. The heights and widths and pen stroke sizes change
at different rates, and a good typographer will design each size of type
individually. I'm not claiming that Figure 14 shows the best way for the
proportions to vary; it will take further experimentation before I have a good
idea of what is desirable. The point I wish to make is that the alteration of
type sizes for subscripts and so on is not as simple as it might seem at first,
but a system like METAFONT will be able to vary the parameters quite
readily, and visual experiments on different parameter settings can be carried
out quickly. It used to take months for a type designer to make his drawings
and have them converted to metal molds before he could see any proofs. One
of the results was that there simply wasn't time to give proper attention to all
the mathematical symbols and Greek letters, etc., as well as to the more
common symbols, so a printer of mathematics had to make do with a
hodge-podge of available characters in different sizes. (For example, he was
often obliged to use different styles of letters in subscript positions, as we
have seen.) Under the approach I am recommending, we automatically get
consistency of all the symbols whenever the parameters change.
FIGURE 15. Lettering equivalent to this raster pattern appears in a Norwegian

tapestry from Gildeskaal old church, woven about 1500 [22, p. 116].
From continuous to discrete. The METAFONT system must not only
define the characters in the continuum on the plane, it must also express them
in terms of a discrete raster. Such squaring off of letters on graph paper has a
long history, going back far before the invention of computers or television;
for example, we all can remember seeing cross-stitch embroidery samplers
from the nineteenth century. The same idea on a finer scale has been used in
tapestries for many centuries: In our own home library, my wife found the
example of Figure 15 which was woven in the northern part of Norway about
1500; this shows the name of St. Thomas in a style imitating contemporary
calligraphy, and I'm sure that examples which antedate the printing press can
be found elsewhere.
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics FIGURE 16.
Adjusting the letters to
mathematics coarser rasters.
Figure 16 shows how METAFONT produces the same letters from the
same parameters but with different degrees of resolution in the raster. This
digitization process itself is considerably more difficult than it may seem at
first, and some nontrivial mathematical concepts were needed before I could
produce satisfactory results. In the first place, it is not sufficient merely to
draw or to imagine drawing the character with infinite precision and then to
"round" it by blacking in all the squares on graph paper that are sufficiently
dark in the true image. One of the reasons this fails is that the three stem lines
of the m, for instance, might be located in different relative positions with
respect to the grid, so that the first stroke ,might round to three units wide
(say) and the second might round to four. This would be quite unsatisfactory,
as the eye quickly picks up such a variation in thickness, but it is avoided by
METAFONT since the pen itself is first digitized and then the same digitized
pen is used for all three strokes. Another problem is that those three strokes
should be equally spaced; it would look bad if there were seven units between
the first two and eight units between the last two, so the program for 'm9
needs to round its points in such a way that this doesn't happen.
The process of digitizing the pen is not trivial either. Suppose, for example,
we want a circular pen that is 2 raster units wide; the appropriate pen is
clearly a 2 X 2 square, which is the closest to a circle that we can come at this
low degree of resolution. Now notice that we can't center a 2 X 2 square on
any particular square, since none of the four squares is at its center; the same
problem arises whenever we have to deal with a pen having even dimensions.
One way to resolve this would be to insist on working only with odd numbers,
but this would be far too limiting; so METAFONT uses a special rounding
rule for the position of the pen's center. In general, suppose the pen is an
ellipse of integer width w and integer height h; then if the pen is to be
positioned at the real coordinates (x, y), its actual position on the discrete
grid is taken to be
(Lx - (w)J, Ly - 8(h)J)
where LxJ denotes the greatest integer less than or equal to JC, and
fi(even) = | , 5(odd) = 0. The pen itself, if positioned at the origin, would
366 D. E. KNUTH

!
Ill**
llttt FIGURE 17.
HUM*
Discrete "elliptical" pens
of small integer width and height.
consist of all integers (x, y) which satisfy
I a ^ j+[$z^wy,+max( 2^1, imy.

This formulawhich incidentally is not the first one I triedensures that the
discrete pen will indeed be w units wide and h units high, when w and h are
positive integers. Figure 17 shows the pens obtained for small w and h.
:>:D
(a)
Still another (b)
problem appears (c)
FIGURE 18.
Difficulties of rounding an arc
properly. (Three circles of radius
10 drawn with a 1 X 3 pen.)
when we want curved lines to look right.

Figure 18(a) shows a semicircle of radius 10 units, drawn with a pen of height
1 and width 3, when the right boundary of the pen falls exactly at an integer
point; the pen sticks out terribly in one place. On the other hand if this right
boundary falls just shy of an integer point, we get the curve in Figure 18(b)
which looks too flat. The ideal occurs in Figure 18(c), when the right
boundary occurs exactly midway between integers. Therefore the META-
FONT programs adjust the location of curves to the raster before actually
drawing the curves, forcing the favorable situation of Figure 18(c); the actual
shape of each letter changes slightly in order to adapt that letter to the desired
raster size in a pleasant way.
There is yet another problem, which arises when the pen is growing in such
a way that the edges of the curve it traces would be monotonie if the pen
were drawn to infinite precision, yet the independent rounding of pen
location and pen width causes this monotonicity to disappear. The problem
arises only rarely, but when it does happen the eye immediately notices it.
Pen width Rounded width

and location and location
(3.5, 0.5,10.5) (3, 0,10)
(3.7, 0.8, 9.5) (3, 0, 9)
(3.9, 1.1, 8.5) (3, 1, 8)
(4.1, 1.4, 7.5) (4, 0, 7)
(4.3, 1.7, 6.5) (4, 1, 6)
(4.5, 2.0, 5.5) (4, 1, 5)
(4.7, 2.3, 4.5) (4, 1, 4)
(4.9, 2.6, 3.5) (4, 2, 3)
(5.1, 2.9, 2.5) (5, 2, 2)
(5.3, 3.2, 1.5) (5, 3, 1)
(5.5, 3.5, 0.5) (5, 3, 0)
FIGURE 19. Failure of monotonicity due to independent rounding.
(Rounding takes (w, x,y) into (L wJ, Lx - 8(L wJ)J, lyJ).)
Consider, for example, the completely linear situation in Figure 19, where
each decrease by one unit in.y is accompanied by an increase of .3 units in x
and an increase of .2 units in the pen width w; the intended pen height is
constant and very small, but in the discrete case the pen height is taken to be
1. The lightly shaded portion of Figure 19 shows the true shape intended, but
the darker squares show that the digitized form yields a nonmonotonic left
boundary. METAFONT compensates for this Sort of problem by keeping
track of the desired boundaries when the pen width is varying, plotting points
twice (e.g. plotting both (x,y) and (x 1,>0) when necessary to keep the
boundary correct. In other words, the idea of rounding the pen location and
the width independently is sometimes effectively abandoned.
The final digitization problem that I needed to resolve was to make the left
half of an "0" look like the mirror image of its right half, to make a left
parenthesis look like the mirror image of a right parenthesis, and so on. This
was done by having the METAFONT programs in such cases choose a center
point that was either exactly at an integer or an integer plus \, and to
introduce dual rounding which could be proved to produce exactly the
correct symmetry properties.
Alternative approaches. As I have said, I believe the METAFONT system is
successful as a way to define letters and other symbols, but probably even
better procedures can be divised with further research. Some of the limita-
tions of my cubic splines are indicated in Figure 20. Part (a) of that
illustration shows a five-pointed star and the word "mathematics" in an
approximation to my own handwriting, done with straight line segments so
that you can see exactly what the data points are that I fed to my spline
routine. Part (b) shows the way my handwriting might look when I get older;
it was obtained by simply setting r = s = 2 in all the spline segments,
therefore making clear what tangent angles are prescribed by the system. Part
(c) is somewhat more disciplined, it was obtained by putting r = s = \
everywhere. Figure 20(d) is like Figure 20(c) but drawn with a combined
pen-and-eraser. Such a combination can lead to interesting effects, and the
star here is my belated contribution to America's bicentennial.
When the general formulas for cubic splines are used as I explained above,
we get Figure 20(e) in which the star has become a very good approximation
368 D. E. KNUTH
(a) ynÂM^r?uz^(k
(b)
(c) y>w/Ajâ<M<jC4...'
(d)
FIGURE 20.
Examples of the cubic splines
(e) applied to sloppy handwriting.
to a circle (as I said it would). In this illustration the pen is thicker and has a
slightly oblique stress. Although my handwriting is inherently unbeautiful,
there are still some kinks in Figure 20(e) that could probably be ironed out if
a different approach were taken.
The most interesting alternative from a mathematical standpoint seems to
be to find a curve of given length that minimizes the integral of the square of
the curvature with respect to arc length. This integral is proportional to the
strain energy in a mechanical spline (in other words, a thin slat or beam) of
the given length, going through the given points, so it seems to be an
appropriate quantity to minimize. E. H. Lee and G. E. Forsythe [31] have
reviewed early work on this variational problem, and shown that it is
equivalent to having the spline at equilibrium with forces applied only at the
given points of support. The Norwegian mathematician Even Mehlum [36]
has shown that if we specify a fixed arc length between consecutive points,
the optimum curve will have linearly changing curvature of the form ax + by
+ c at point (x,y\ and he has suggested choosing the constants by taking
b/a = (y2 - y\)/(x2 xx) between (xl9yx) and (x2,y2% and requiring that
slope and curvature be continuous across endpoints. Such an approach seems
to require considerably more computation than the cubic splines recom-
mended here, but it may lead to better curves, e.g. satisfying the extensional-
ity property.
Another interesting approach to curve-drawing, which may be especially
useful for simulating handwriting, is a "filtering" method suggested to me
recently by Michael S. Paterson of the University of Warwick (unpublished).
To get a smooth curve passing through points zk, assuming that these points
are about equally spaced on the desired curve, one simply writes
*(<) - 2 (-!)**/(* - *)/ 2 (- i)V - *)

where (/) is an odd function of order t' as / - 0, decreasing rapidly away
from zero; e.g.,
(*) = csch / = 2 / ( e ' - <T')
I have not had time yet to experiment with Paterson's method or to attempt
to harness it for the drawing of letters. It is easy to see that the derivative
*'(**) = / 0 ) 0 * + i - **-i) - /(2)(** +2 - **-2> + ' l i e s approximately in
the direction of zk+l zk_v
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
mathematics
math emat \cs
mat\ie;nat\cp
mathematici F*21.
niatJiein&ti es SSSSt.T.
Randomization. In conclusion, I'd like to report on a little experiment that I
did with random numbers. One might complain that the letters I have
designed are too perfect, too much like a computer, so they lack "character."
In order to counteract this, we can build a certain amount of randomness into
the choices of where to put the pen when drawing each letter, and Figure 21
shows what happens. The coordinates of key pen positions were chosen
independently with a normal distribution and with increasing standard
deviation, so that the third example has twice as much standard deviation as
the second, the fourth has three times as much, and so on. Note that the two
m's on each line (except the first) are different,FIGURE
and so
22. are the a's and the t%
since each letter is randomly drawn. A bit of randomness introduced
into various styles of type.
mathematics
After the deviation gets sufficiently large the results become somewhat
mathematics
ludicrous; and I don't want people to say that I ended this lecture by making
a travesty of mathematics. So let us conclude by looking at Figure 22, which
mathematics
shows what is obtained in various fonts when the degree of randomness is
somewhat controlled. I think it can be said that the letters in this final
mthamutlos
example have a warmth and charm which makes it hard to believe that they
370 D. E. KNUTH
were really generated by a computer following strict mathematical rules.

Perhaps the reason that the printing of mathematics looked so nice in the
good old days was that the fonts of type were imperfect and inconsistent.
Summary. I'd like to summarize now by pointing out the moral of this long
story. My experiences during the last few months vividly illustrate the fact
that there are plenty of good mathematical problems still waiting to be
solved, almost everywhere you lookespecially in areas of life where
mathematics has rarely been applied before. Mathematicians can provide
solutions to these problems, receiving a double payoffnamely the pleasure
of working out the mathematics, together with the appreciation of the people
who can use the solutions. So let's go forth and apply mathematics in new
ways.
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank my wife Jill for the many im-
portant suggestions she made to me during critical stages of this research;
also Leo Guibas and Lyle Ramshaw for the help they provided in making
illustrations at Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories; also Lester Earnest,
Michael Fischer, Frank Liang, Tom Lyche, Albert Meyer, Michael Paterson,
Michael Plass, Bob Sproull, Jean E. Taylor, and Hans Wolf, for helpful ideas
and stimulating discussions and correspondence about this topic; also
Gordon L. Walker, for verifying my conjectures about the printing history of
the Transactions and for providing me with additional background
information; also Professor Dirk Siefkes for his help in acquiring Figures 4(c)
and 11(c), and the Kunstbibliothek Berlin der Staatlichen Museen Preus-
sischer Kulturbesitz for permission to publish them; and to Andr Jammes
for permission to publish Figures 6 and 11(d).
Bibliography. The references below include several articles not referenced
in the main text, namely a discussion of publishing at the American Institute
of Physics [37]; some experiments in typesetting physics journals with the Bell
Labs system [32], [7]; computer aids for technical magazine layout and
editing, together with a brief proposal for a standard typesetting language
[11]; reports about early computer programs for character generation and
mathematics composition [23], [30], [34], [35], [40], [46]; a description of the
mathematics a traditional printer needs to know [9]; three standard references
on the typesetting of mathematics [14], [47], [50]; some fonts of type and
special characters designed by the American Mathematical Society [39]; a
recent and highly significant approach to mathematical definition of tradi-
tional type faces based on conic sections and on one-dimensional splines [15];
a proposal for a new way to control the spacing between letters based on
somewhat mathematical principles [28]; and two purely mathematical papers
inspired by typography [13], [21].
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Communications of the ACM 18 (1975), 740.
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number PB168627.
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systems, National Science Foundation grant GN-533; NTIS number PB182088.
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(April 1971), National Science Foundation grant GN-690; NTIS number PB200892.
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Today 30,12 (December 1977), 75.
8. Donald M. Anderson, Cresci and his capital alphabets, Visible Language 4 (1971), 331-352.
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10. Michael P. Barnett, Computer typesetting: Experiments and prospects, Cambridge, Mass.,
M.I.T. Press, 1965.
11. Robert W. Bemer and A. Richard Shriver, Integrating computer text processing with
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publication of a primary journal, Proc. AFIPS Nat. Comput. Conf. 42, Part II (1973), M16-M20.
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IEEE Trans, on Prof. Commun. PC-19 (1976), 15-19.
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mathematics, Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1954.
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Editiones Officinae Bodoni, 1960.
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Naval Weapons Laboratory, August 1967; NTIS number AD662398.
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Commun. PC-15 (1972), 13-16.
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372 D. E. KNUTH
28. David Kindersley, Optical letter spacing for new printing systems, London, Wynkyn de
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report CS675, September, 1978. To be published by the American Mathematical Society.
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120-133.
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Computing Science Tech. Report 44, Murray Hill, N. J., Bell Laboratories, June, 1976.
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Officini Bodoni, 1971.
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letters, Communications of the ACM 10 (1967), 627-630.
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Trans, on Prof. Commun. PC-18 (1975), 274-278.
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orders of print letters: viz, the {roman, italick, english) capitals and small', Shewing how they are
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Moxon, 1676.
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Palatino and his circle, Signature, n.s. 14 (1952), 3-39.
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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY. STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305

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Donald Knuth, 1979, Mathematical Typografy, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) Volume 1, Number 2 (1979), 337-372 PDF

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BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE

AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY

ABSTRACT. Mathematics books and journals do not look as beautiful as they

I will be speaking today about work in progress, instead of completed

FIGURE 1. A sequence of typographical styles in the AMS Transactions'.

in this lecture why I am so excited about the project on which I am currently

THE JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS LECTURESHIP

T H E FIRST JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS LECTURE

FIGURE 2. A time of transition.

preliminary announcement in 1923 appeared in the modern typeface used

methods of typesetting, and the Society eventually had to resort to a fancy

Formula Type C Type B Type T

$fl$s2$t 1 over 2 1 \over 2

*gqH2 theta sup 2 \thetaT2

$rf(x'i)$t sqrt{f(x sub i )} \sqrt{f(x4)}

FIGURE 3. Three ways to describe a formula.

'This has no connection with a similarly-named system recently announced by Honeywell

symbols don't appear on conventional typewriters, they are common on

construct what I call boxes. A character of type by itself is a box, as is a solid

rapidly-disappearing hot lead process. It appeared that my books would soon

PROPERTY 1 (INVARIANCE). If the given points are rotated, translated, or

PROPERTY 6 (ROUNDNESS). If z z2, z3, z4 are consecutive points of a circle,

+ 4/7(1 - 0(1 - * ~ **')(sin \ ) / (l + cos | )

modern S. Furthermore I think the engraver of the French S cheated a little

(a) Mathematical Mathematical (b)

(c) Mathematical Mathematical (d)

(e) Mathematical Mathematical (0

(g) MATHEMATICAL MATi-icmaticai (h)

FIGURE 13. Different styles of type obtained by varying the parameters to

FIGURE 15. Lettering equivalent to this raster pattern appears in a Norwegian

consist of all integers (x, y) which satisfy

I a ^ j+[$z^wy,+max( 2^1, imy.

when we want curved lines to look right.

Pen width Rounded width

*(<) - 2 (-!)**/(* - *)/ 2 (- i)V - *)

were really generated by a computer following strict mathematical rules.

1. A. V. Aho, S. C. Johnson, and J. D. Ullman, Typesetting by ACM considered harmful.

3. American Mathematical Society, Development of computer aids for tape-control of photocomr

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY. STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305

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*(<) - 2 (-!)**/(* - )/ 2 (- i)V - )