TeX Fonts and Metafont

[David Wright]

Now that we're using TeX we want to design/modify some fonts, both to get
different sizes of standard ones (e.g. I need smaller san-serif fonts)
and to add a few 'local' characters for logos etc..

1 - Are the metafont files that the standard TeX fonts were made from
generally available?  (the font tape distributed by Stanford has .PXL
files of many sizes but no .MF files)?

2 - Has anyone ported Metafont to VAX VMS?  The VMS TeX distribution has only
the web file, which generates a massive Pascal program which is nearly (==not)
VMS Pascal compatible.   I don't have time to do this port at present, and
I certainly don't want to if it's been done already. 

3 - As there didn't seem to be a suitable test file in the TeX distribution, 
I've produced a simple test file that prints all the (27) 10pt fonts 
on the standard distribution tape, to check that they work and see how they 
look.  It's adjusted to just fit into the 155KBytes font memory of our LN03 
(including one 128K RAM pod), but would presumably work with any other 
output device which is not too short of font memory.  
Does anyone else want a copy? - I'll post it if there's enough interest.

4 - The above test shows that ambxsl10.nft (and the .pxl file it came from)
is faulty, and won't print.  Magnified versions such as ambxsl10.120 are
OK!  Is this `just us', or is this a dud file generally?

5 - Does anyone have a version of the typewriter fonts in which M and N
don't look as if they've been through a strainer?