I'm a bit surprised the author of "The strange allure of making your own fonts" didn't mention the classic work on computer typefonts by Donald Knuth. Knuth is almost certainly the greatest computer scientist of the twentieth century and has had a near obsession with developing computer software to typeset his books - which means full-blown mathematical text. His classic work on the subject, the software known as TeX, received a prize from the American Mathematical Society in the late 1970's. His prize lecture was published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1979, with the title "TeX and Metafont: New Directions in Typesetting". While TeX itself is interesting software, the corresponding work on creating typefonts is also a very significant work.

The manual for Metafont, "The METAFONTbook", published by Addison Wesley (1986) is also an interesting piece of software. As the Preface to this work explains, "METAFONT is a system for the design of alphabets suited to raster-based devices that print or display text." It later continues "A METAFONT usseres writes a 'program' for each letter or symbol of a typeface."

Both TeX and METAFONT are available through the Web. For Windows, the usual package is MikTeX - a rather large and sophisticated installation. However, the software and the fonts are extremely stable. Readers interested in advanced versions of typefonts might well take a look at METAFONT.