At 15.05 +0200 2001-05-14, I wrote: >Don't overestimate Knuth's foresight here. He needed some place to store >the font-related information TeX would need, so he simply packed all kinds >of information into a single file. I now see that I was wrong about Knuth's role in this. tex.web says: The format of TFM files was designed by Lyle Ramshaw in 1980. The intent is to convey a lot of different kinds of information in a compact but useful form. Lars Hellström