In reply to Do people use Metafont?:
coming too late, but I have to say something about. The reason why MF has not taken off is explaned by Knuth himself: "asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much.".
MF is a totally different, not visual, approach to font creation. And nowadays the visual approach, the WYSIWYG is mostly preferred.
There are some misconception I would like to correct.
MF output is bitmap. Exactly in the same way all scalable vector graphics is bitmap once "produced" and displayed or printed. But usually you don't see the process and the file describing the font is considered the "final" resource. The Metafont source(s) for a well designed font should be considered the same way and so Metafont source(s) is the "final" resource and the font is scalable (provided it is well programmed).
If you don't know the resolution of the target device where your text will be displayed, you have to distribute the MF files - altogether with the document that is going to use that font and metrics tfm files.
So a correct setup and software combination can produce high quality "texts" for any device at any resolution (don't forget the files original TeX produce are called ".dvi" that is DeVice Independet: the only device dependent part is the font itself!).
The problem is that for sure such a system is not good for desktop displays, nor for web. It could be good for typography, having well designed fonts (and as said it is hard to design fonts this way, harder than using a graphical approach), but there are other "problems", for example it is surely faster to "convert" a ttf glyph into bitmap to display (there could be even some sort of hardware aid!) than generating the whole "metafont" bitmap fonts at the needed resolution.
Another note: most of you when you say "parametric" seem to think about font parameters you can change programmatically. Indeed, the whole design of your font can be parametric, helping you to give consistency to a family and also to obtain rther different fonts from the very same source.