Why is it that everytime you want to make a somewhat unknown application work, you have to spend ages converting and compiling tons of things ?
I was trying to set up Metafont to give a try at programming some fonts, but just everything seems to be going wrong (you have to compile your own "fonts" (that aren't really fonts as I have understood) for the DVI Viewer to be able to work at all (otherwise it won't even display a dot or anything), to do so you have to convert a file to another to another to ... and so many things. It finally went wrong (for absolutely no apparent reason, I followed all the steps given in a tutorial), so I give up on that.).

Anyway, so the main reason I'm posting this, is to ask how the font system in TeX/LaTeX actually works. I've seen other fonts besides Computer Modern are available, like AMS Euler, but how would you go creating such a font (do you have to create it through Metafont ?), and what exactly should it include ? For example, is the integral sign just one character or is it more than that ? What would a standard font include ? (Like, I suppose you'd have a font for the variables, one for the text, then the standard blackboard bold, fraktur and script, ...)
And how would you recommend creating one ? (And no I have no experience in typography :p)

Thanks

http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/

http://www.tug.org/fonts/

Also, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rf10/pstex/index.htm is good