[tex-live] Metafont fonts and X (font server?)

[Karl Berry]

    I'm thinking about some way to generate them as needed from the
    Metafont source

Does the X font server have a way to dynamically create fonts a la
mktexpk? 

All the X font searching I've seen works in the other direction: given a
request for a font foo at some size, it returns the closest existing
font, or scales a scalable font, if available.  But I'm not very well
acquainted with xfs.

    Is that just a pipe dream? If so, is it because there's no
    implementation or

I've never heard of an implementation along these lines, but technically
I don't see any real barriers to running mf, converting the resulting gf
to bdf, and adding it to an X font dir, running mkfontdir, etc.  Or
doing the equivalent through xfs.

There is an ancient archive at ftp://tug.org/tex/bdf-unsupported.tar.gz
with code for converting gf to bdf.  I haven't looked at it in many many
years, but I don't imagine it would be too hard to get running again.

Best,
karl