Mathematical Fonts
It’s sad how hard it is to get good information on the TeX system. Getting information on the basic programs: tex and metafont, isn’t hard at all– Knuth took care of that with four books, and even an extra one on the Computer Modern fonts, so you can see how to use metafont. But past that, the infrastructure that has grown up around TeX is bewildering, and depressingly underdocumented.
My acquaintance with this fact was just renewed, as I looked for font metric information on the Bakoma Computer Modern TrueType families. In the end, I just gave up, not least of all because I couldn’t find the information I’m looking for. The bitmap files metafont produces are so much better documented. Put those together with Appendix G of the TeXbook, and I should be able to emulate the TeX display engine well enough for the purposes of a CAS front end (something along the lines of JSMath).
Yep, I’ve a one track mind, and it has brought me back to that old horse. I’m once again attempting to produce a universal CAS frontend. I’ve decided to make it reliant on Metafont for font production; that’ll mean users will have to have a working metafont installation, but it also means that accurate metric information will be available for every different font size, and it opens up the possibility for later increasing compatibility with TeX. My initial goal is to make the system capable of displaying mathematical expressions with the same quality as TeX, but I see no reason why in the future it could not come closer to being a full TeX implementation.