Question:

Is there a relationship between the point structure of Le Monde and

any commercial font of Times New Roman? The story I

heard was that Porchez claimed Le Monde was

point-pirated from TNR in the early 90s, but could not remember

which particular version he pirated. Later, so I heard, he thought

better of this story and denied it. Later still, John Hudson told me that Porchez hired

Tiro Typeworks to redigitize Le Monde to remove all traces of the piracy.                  

 

Could the fonts themselves establish if there was any basis to these stories?

Comparisons:

I compared several cuts of Times New Roman and the 1994 Le Monde font.

Adobe 1989
Adobe 1993
Monotype TNR PS
Adobe/Mono TNR PS
Adobe/Lino Times 10
Apple Times

Comparing Le Monde 94 to the Times fonts, I zeroed in on 1993 Adobe Times (supplied with Illustrator 6) because of the unusual digital structure of the top stem of b.
Le Monde uses the same unusual structure for all of the relevant characters:   d, h, i (most unusually), j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, etc.
In no other font of Times could I find this structure. Here is Adobe Times from 1989.
Adobe/Lino Times Ten
Adobe/Mono TNR PS (this seems to be the version of Times that Porchez used to illustrate the pdf on Gary Munch's site which does not show any of the characters discussed here)
Apple TNR


Other clues?  
 

 

In the asciitilde character the two glyphs were 

perfectly identical except that the Le Monde points had all

been horizontally shifted left by exactly one unit. Coincidence?    .

 

I found a a few dozen other identical glyphs in 93 Adobe TNR and 94 Le Monde.

They were not identical or even similar to any other font of Times New Roman

that I had, or any other font I could find.

93 Adobe TNR
94 Le Monde
94 Le Monde Italic
Apple TNR
1989 Adobe TNR
Mono/Adobe TNR PS
Lino/Adobe Times Ten
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