Donald Knuth "32 Years of Metafont" at the San Francisco Public Library

These are the slides from a talk Knuth gave recently in San Francisco, at the public library[1]. I attended (it was FREE!), and I thought it was quite good — this was the first time I've ever seen Knuth in person, let alone a lecture by him. As other comments note, the slides in isolation aren't really that great; you really need the video. The talk was titled Thirty Two Years of Metafont, with a subtext of "Donald Knuth will reminisce and talk about things he remembers." It was, in fact, his musings on Metafont, which I found quiet interesting. lifepillar helpfully found the video in another comment[2]: ▶ this video One of my senior classes in college was Typography, the final project of which was to author a font, A-Z a-z 0-9 and some punctuation. That is a grueling task, and I have a lot of respect now for the people who can do it and have the result not look terrible (as mine did). In particular, in the talk, Knuth notes the difficulty of the letter "S" — which nearly drove me insane trying to render it as part of my final project, so I found it quite humorous that it also gave him a bit of grief. It is a frustrating letter when you need to not just write one, but accurately describe it to a computer. [1]: link [2]: link