What are the EC fonts?
A font consists of a number of glyphs. In order that the glyphs may be printed, they are encoded, and the encoding is used as an index into tables within the font. For various reasons, Knuth chose deeply eccentric encodings for his Computer Modern family of fonts; in particular, he chose different encodings for different fonts, so that the application using the fonts has to remember which font of the family it’s using before selecting a particular glyph. When TeX version 3 arrived, most of the excuses for the eccentricity of Knuth’s encodings went away, and at TUG’s Cork meeting, an encoding for a set of 256 glyphs, for use in TeX text, was defined. The intention was that these glyphs should cover ‘most’ European languages that use Latin alphabets, in the sense of including all accented letters needed. (Knuth’s CMR fonts missed things necessary for Icelandic and Polish, for example, but the Cork fonts have them. Even Cork’s coverage isn’t complete: it misses letters from Romanian, East
