[texhax] \textordfeminine in plain TeX

[Karl Berry]

    There is a mapping in some font map file which maps "Helvetica" to
    the "real" font name.

Do you think so?  It's possible, but it would be the "aliases" file
rather than a .map file per se (.map files mostly map tfm names to
.pfb/.ttf/.whatever to include).  And we removed the aliases file a
couple years ago in TL, though I dunno about other distributions.

My first guess would be that there is a file Helvetica.tfm on the system.

Presence or absence of .afm files is definitely immaterial.

k