“i found that
writing software
was much more
difficult than
anything else i had
done in my life. i had
to keep so many
things in my head
at once. i couldn’t
just put it down
and start something
else. it really took
over my life during
this period.”

the spring of 1977, I could be found mostly in the Stanford Library reading about the history of letter forms. Before I went to China that summer I had drafted the letters for A to Z.

PHO TOGRAPH B Y TIMO TH Y ARCHIBALD

One of the greatest disappointments in my whole life was the day I received in the mail the new edition of The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2, which was typeset with my fonts and which was supposed to be the crowning moment of my life, having succeeded with the TeX project. I think it was 1981, and I had the best typesetting equipment, and I had written a program for the 8-bit microprocessor inside. It had 5,000 dots-per-inch, and all the proofs coming out looked good on this machine. I went over to Addison-Wesley, who had typeset it. There was the book, and it was in the familiar beige covers. I opened the book up and I’m thinking, “Oh, this is going to be a nice moment.” I had Volume 2, first edition. I had Volume 2, second edition. They were supposed to look the same. Everything I had known up to that point was that they would look the same. All the measurements seemed to agree. But a lot of distortion goes on, and our optic nerves aren’t linear. All kinds of things were happening. I