The METAFONTbook Contains a Sentence That Search Engines Haven’t Indexed

In Knuth’s The METAFONTbook:

Actually a font like logo10 is rarely used to typeset anything except the one word, ‘METAFONT’; but the spacing parameters have been included just in case somebody wants to typeset a sentence like ‘AN EFFETE TOMATO OF MONTANA OFTEN ATE NONFAT TOFFEE’. (97)

The strings of capitals are set in the METAFONT logo typeface.

AN EFFETE TOMATO OF MONTANA OFTEN ATE NONFAT TOFFEE

It’s a mildly interesting sentence in that it uses only the letters in the METAFONT logo, but the surprising part is this sentence doesn’t appear to have been indexed by any major internet search engine as of when I wrote this note in March 2023, despite various PDFs floating around and Knuth publishing the book’s TeX\TeX source.

Examining the source helps explain what’s going on. I’ve removed the hard line breaks.

Actually a font like |logo10| is rarely used to typeset anything except the one word, `\MF\kern1pt'; but the spacing parameters have been included just in case somebody wants to typeset a sentence like `{\manual kn illiji jmhkjm ml hmnjknk mljin kji nmnlkj jmllii}'.

We can examine the manfnt font and see that the METAFONT logo glyphs have been merged with a bunch of others and assigned what looks like an arbitrary character map to make it all fit. k maps to the A glyph, n maps to to the N, and so on. Indexers never see the “TOMATO OF MONTANA” string.

The manfnt glyphs

Sources

  1. Donald E. Knuth. “CTAN: Package Metafont” (external link). 5 February 2021. Accessed 4 March 2023.
  2. ⸻. The METAFONTbook. 1986.