Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: MetaFont and X Windows
Message-ID: <1989Sep26.025429.19513@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 26 Sep 89 02:54:29 GMT
References: <251D4132.1DE7@marob.masa.com>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY 14627, (716) 275-1448
Lines: 18
Keywords: MetaFont,X11,Windows

|I was delighted to discover recently that when I run MetaFont on
|my Sun 3, while also running X, the showit command causes a separate
|xterm window to pop up, where the newly created font is displayed.
|Now I installed X, and I also installed TeX and MetaFont, yet I did
|not do anything explicitly to cause this to happen. Could somebody
|comment on how MetaFont talks to X? Where can I find documentation
|on the relationship between TeX/MetaFont and X? Thanks!

Yup, some kindly gremlins snuck it into the code when you went home
after unloading the tape. :-)

No, seriously, look at site.h. There is a #define for X10 or X11
support.

Actually Unix MF has had a history of windowing support. The Pascal
version had hooks to SunView. So it's not surprising X support has been
added.  It's probably as simple as a procedure hook to the MF command
\showit.