MFLUA(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

🦋 MFLUA(1) — the manual page for MFLua 🦋

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about MFLua — that's MFLua version 2.71828182-1.0.1-alpha (TeX Live 2026), living in the User Commands section of the manual. she's giving compiler energy, she's giving Metafont-with-a-glow-up, and honestly? she ate.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mflua [OPTION]... [MFNAME[.mf]] [COMMANDS]
mflua [OPTION]... RST-LINE
mflua [OPTION]... &BASE ARGS

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So here's the vibe. You run mflua on MFNAME, and usually she makes you MFNAME.tfm and MFNAME.NNNNgf — where NNNN is the resolution of whatever mode you specified, and heads up, that resolution is 2602 by default. 🎀

Any following COMMANDS? Those get processed as Metafont input, after MFNAME has been read. Order matters, periodt.

Now, if the first line of MFNAME is %&BASE and BASE is a .base file that actually exists — slay, she uses it. Otherwise she falls back to NAME.base, where NAME is the program invocation name, and most commonly that's just mf. 😌

Alternatively (she loves an alternative):

  • if the first non-option argument begins with a backslash \, then all the non-option arguments get interpreted as a single line of Metafont input.
  • if the first non-option argument begins with a &, then the next word is taken as the BASE to read, and that overrides literally everything else. Any arguments left over after that get processed the same way as above. 👑

And if you pass no arguments and no options at all? She just prompts you for input. no thoughts, just waiting for you to speak. 🫶

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

  • -base=BASENAME — use BASENAME instead of the program name or a %& line
  • -no-file-line-error, -file-line-error — disable / enable file:line:error style messages
  • -halt-on-error — stop processing at the very first error, no mercy, we stan a firm boundary 💅
  • -ini — be inimf, for dumping bases; this is implicitly true if the program name is inimf
  • -interaction=STRING — set the interaction mode, where STRING is one of batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode or errorstopmode
  • -jobname=STRING — set the job name to STRING
  • -kpathsea-debug=NUMBER — set path searching debugging flags according to the bits of NUMBER
  • -no-mktex=FMT, -mktex=FMT — disable / enable mktexFMT generation, where FMT is mflua
  • -output-directory=DIR — use an existing DIR as the directory to write files in
  • -no-parse-first-line, -parse-first-line — disable / enable parsing of the first line of the input file
  • -progname=STRING — set program (and base) name to STRING
  • -recorder — enable the filename recorder
  • -translate-file=TCXNAME — use the TCX file TCXNAME
  • -8bit — make all characters printable by default
  • -help — display this help and exit
  • -version — output version information and exit

😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

Found a bug? Don't suffer in silence, bestie — email bug reports to luigi.scarso@gmail.com.

ngl this next part is the serious bit, so read it, okay? 🫶

kpathsea version 6.4.2

Copyright 2026 L. Scarso.

There is NO warranty. Redistribution of this software is covered by the terms of both the MFLua copyright and the Lesser GNU General Public License. 💜

For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING and the MFLua source.

Primary author of MFLua: L. Scarso.

and that's the whole page, bestie — TeX Live, dated February 2026, and this little legend of a manual page checked out right on cue. no cap. ✨👑💖

📦 where this page comes from