Can You Create X11 Fonts With METAFONT?

Mike Hicks asks " The current state of fonts for XFree86 has been lamented many times by many people. The resolution and clarity of modern displays continues to get better, meaning that fonts designed for 75 and even 100 dpi are becoming small and unreadable. Not to mention the fact that many fonts are relatively poor -- many only have a single set of attributes. Most fonts that I come across are just normal, bold, or italic. It is very hard to find a new font set that has normal, bold, italic, and bold italic typefaces. Of course, a true Open Sourcerer would go out and make these fonts, but there are only a handful of font-creation utilities out there (and most of them are only good for bitmapped fonts). All seems nearly lost, but I re-discovered something this weekend. The METAFONT package was developed by Donald E. Knuth (et al) in the late 1970s in order to produce high-quality fonts for the Tau Epsilon Chi (T_EX -- now you know why it sounds like `blech') typesetting system." Has anyone used METAFONT for the express purpose of creating fonts for X11? How did it work out?

"After reading through Knuth's 1979 book, TEX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting, it seems to me that METAFONT would be a good way to produce new fonts for X Windows (and console and printing..). I'm not certain if it's possible to produce PostScript Type 1 fonts from METAFONT (some say it isn't possible, while the GNU Font Utils package seems to be a way to do it), it would still be possible to create a large number of bitmapped fonts for various point sizes and display resolutions.

Well, I -think- it's possible...

Has anyone ever done what I'm describing? I haven't had much luck deciphering the documentation I've been able to find. Granted, I haven't yet plunked down $50 for a copy of The METAFONTbook, but even that reference may not be of any use, as it probably predates any widespread use of X Windows."