This is an OpenType implementation of Donald Knuth's Punk font.

The original Metafont sources were adapted to a more MetaPost friendly form by Taco Hoekwater et al.

Punk is a dynamic font, every time a glyph is requested Matafont draws a unique instance of it. On the other hand, OpenType is static, glyph outlines are drawn once and stored in the font and the renderer can not alter those outlines. To emulate the dynamic nature of Punk, we generate several alternate shapes of each glyph and store them in the font. Alternate shapes are mapped to the base character using OpenType "Randomize" feature (rand), which tells the renderer to select glyphs randomly from the list of alternate shapes.

The PostScript outlines of the glyphs are generated by MetaPost, a Python script then uses FontForge to import the glyphs into an OpenType CFF font. Since this year is the 2^5 anniversary of TeX, each lower case letter have 2^5 variants, 2^4 for each upper case and 2^3 for the rest.

This font is free software, you can do whatever you want with it as long as you use different font and file names. The exact copyright statement is:

"Unlimited copying and redistribution of this file are permitted as long as this file is not modified. Modifications are permitted, but only if the resulting file is not named 'punknova.otf' and the (internal) fontname differs from 'Punk Nova'."

The MetaPost source has the following notice:

This file is a merge of the original punk files by Donald Knuth, who added this comment:

Font inspired by Gerard and Marjan Unger's lectures, Feb 1985 The regular punk files are part of TeXLive and in Metafont format. All errors introduced are ours. We also changed the encoding to unicode. In due time we might add a few more more characters. We still need to improve some of the metrics which involves a bit of trial and error. The font just covers basic latin shapes but in ConTeXt MkIV we add virtual composed shapes. There is a module m-punk.tex that implements this. This derivate is also used in mk.tex (mk.pdf) which is one of our tests for LuaTeX. We published an article on it in the MAPS (NTG magazine).

2008, Taco Hoekwater & Hans Hagen

The MAPS article is available online.

Khaled Hosny

6 Aug. 2010