The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]

Hacker News Top Papers

Summary

Donald Knuth's classic 1980 paper on the design and mathematics of the letter S in his Metafont system.

No content available
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 05/21/26, 06:24 AM

Source: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1980-knuth.pdf

Similar Articles

Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023)

Hacker News Top

Designer Jens Kutilek documents the mathematical and historical research behind reviving IBM Selectric Composer typefaces, exploring the unit-based spacing system and engineering constraints of the iconic 1960s typewriter. The project involved reverse-engineering IBM's 9-unit glyph width system used by the Selectric Composer's interchangeable 'golf ball' type elements.

Designing Lispy DSLs, part 1: SCSS (2012)

Lobsters Hottest

This article explores the design of Lispy domain-specific languages using SCSS, a Scheme-based CSS preprocessor, as a case study. It discusses how SCSS represents CSS as first-class values and the limitations of its implementation.