The Computer Modern typefaces are described in great detail (including full source code) in the book Computer

Modern Typefaces, volume E in the Computers and Typesetting series, which is unique in the history of font design: in Knuth's words, they "belong to the class of sets of books that describe precisely their own appearance." As implied by the name, Computer Modern is a modern font. Modern, or "Didone", fonts have high contrast between thick and thin elements, and their axis of "stress" or thickening is perfectly vertical. Computer Modern, specifically, is based on Monotype Modern 8a, and like its immediate model it has a large x-height relative to the length of ascenders anddescenders. The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with the Metafont system. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence of serifs or old-style numerals, whether dots such as the dot on the "i" are square or rounded, and the degree of "superness" in the bowls of lowercase letters such as "g" and "o". Computer Modern is by no means the only Metafont-designed typeface, but it is by far the most mature and widely used. [edit]Derived

versions

Knuth produced his original Computer Modern fonts using Metafont, a program that reads strokebased definitions of glyphs and outputs ready-to-use fonts as bitmap image files. The advance of publishing technology (PostScript, PDF, laser printers) has reduced the need for bitmap fonts. The preferred formats are now outline fonts such as Type 1, TrueType, or OpenType, which can be rendered efficiently at arbitrary resolution and using sophisticated anti-aliasing techniques by printer firmware or on-screen document viewers. Therefore, several other projects have ported the Computer Modern fonts into such formats. Some of these projects have also complemented Computer Modern with additional characters (euro, accented characters, Cyrillic and Greek script coverage) different font encodings (to overcome problems with Knuth's original 8-bit character sets) additional font style variants