PatEL

A huge helping of praise gets lumped onto Iosevka, from me, for the way it is defined in a custom S-expression DSL. https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL It’s a real hackers typeface.

For me, a modern descendant of METAFONT is probably Iosevka's build system, which has its own internal DSL, PatEL, for defining its font forms, based on decomposed sub-functions. PatEL's a Lisp-with-infixes-and-indentation that compiles to JS[1]. See the definitions of "O" and related glyphs for a good example[2]. [1] https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL [2] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/main/packages/font-...

I learned recently that the creator of the Iosevka typeface did so using their own Lisp implementation. The typeface: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka The language: https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL Their tool which they used to build the language: https://github.com/be5invis/patrisika These kinds of projects are deeply inspirational. Striving to achieve one percent of this output would be enough for me. Knowing there are people like Belleve / Renzhi Li and their team in the world -- that I might be able to do something like what they do if I, too, try hard -- is what makes me get out of bed in the morning. It is incredible that there are people like them, doing what they do, and sharing it freely. Thank you so much. PS: Re: inspo: Hope 16 is next week :D https://www.hope.net/pdf/hope_16_schedule.pdf

That’s the "Patel" programming language used to define Iosevka. See https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL.

I'm surprised there are no comments here about the code! It looks like the characters of the font are specified programmatically on top of a self-contained glyph-drawing library, all written in a custom Lisp dialect ("patel") running on top of node, written by the same author as the font. Really impressive! https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/tree/master/glyphs https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/tree/master/support https://github.com/be5invis/patel

Nope, it compiles to JavaScript. The compiler is in http://github.com/be5invis/PatEL and it uses Patrisika (http://github.com/be5invis/patrisika) as its backend (which converts S-expression-ish AST into Mozilla AST, and generates JavaScript using Escodegen).