Re: Metafont fonts in the K.Berry scheme

[Ulrik Vieth <vieth@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de>]

> Can it really be that the traditional METAFONT fonts used by
> TeX & friends do not fit into the well-known "Karl Berry" scheme 
> for font names?

Sure, that's the reason why there exists a special.map file containing
a list of fonts (or font prefixes) with non-standard names.

> Some examples:

> Metafont name ! description         ! meaning in the KB scheme
> ==============================================================
> cmr.....      ! CM Roman            ! Compugraphic Madrone
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ecr....       ! EC Roman            ! Apple Courier
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> tcr....       ! dito Text Companion ! ParaGraph Courier
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ccr.....      ! Concrete Roman      ! Compugraphic Courier
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> eor.....      ! EC Concrete Roman   ! Apple Orator
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> tor.....      ! dito Text Companion ! ParaGraph Orator
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> cmbr....      ! CM Bright           ! Compugraphic ???
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ebr.....      ! EC Bright           ! Apple Berling
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> tbr.....      ! dito Text Companion ! Paragraph Berling
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ma......      ! Malvern             ! Monotype ???
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> pnr.....      ! Pandora Roman       ! Adobe New Berolina
> --------------------------------------------------------------

The list goes on if you have to deal with vendor-supplied font names
of non-MF fonts:

  mtm.....        Math Time             Monotype Times
  mte.....        Math Time Extension   Monotype TimesEuope
  mtg.....        Math Time Greek       Monotype TradeGothic

  lbr.....        Lucida Bright         Linotype Berling
  lbd.....        Lucida Bright Demi    Linotype Bodoni
  lbm.....        Lucida New Math       Linotype Bulmer
  lbt.....        Lucida Bright TT      Linotype Boton
  lsr.....        Lucida Sans           Linotype SnellRounded
  lsb.....        Lucida Sans Bold      Linotype Sabon
  lst.....        Lucida Sans TT        Linotype Stone

  etc.

> On the German mailing list TEX-D-L there was a fontname clash
> reported today:  Concrete Text Companion had been mixed up with
> Paragraph Orator, which indeed is existing and had been available 
> on the system.

That's an unfortunate coincidence indeed, but it's a very rare case
considering how many or how few TeX users in the world might have
Paragraph Orator.  A collision with the name of a widely used font
such as Times Roman would certainly be desastrous, but in your case
it's just bad luck.

> Unfortunately it's me who has adapted DEK's Concrete fonts to the
> T1 and TS1 encodings, and I'm responsible for choosing the naming 
> scheme eorxxxxx and torxxxxx for them, so I think I should start 
> discussing the problem in the public.

> As far as I can see, other well-known MF fonts may be affected, too.  
> Fortunately, the "duplicate" fonts do not (yet?) exist.

Given that the fontname scheme is reaching its limits (running out of
one-letter supplier codes and two-letter font IDs), I'm afraid we will
have to come up with a better naming scheme sooner or later anyway.
But until then collisions with MF font names will be unavoidable
unless you rename all your fonts according to the fontname scheme,
i.e. torm1000 -> fxxr8t10 (where xx = new fontname code for Concrete).

Cheers, Ulrik.