The Adobe Type team has been wrestling a bit with Shakespeare’s timeless question as we wrap up some newly-enhanced typeface families here.

When we make changes in a typeface that could cause  line lengths different from those produced by the previous version, we believe it’s necessary to change the font name a bit so the two versions can’t be accidentally swapped and reflow people’s existing documents. We usually do this by changing suffixes.

Std & Pro
One of the biggest changes we ever made was moving the Adobe Type Library into the OpenType format (starting in 1998). We figured the best way to preserve some continuity yet differentiate the new fonts was to add a suffix to each font’s name. Fonts with our Western European character set would get a “Std” suffix, while those that also supported the Central & Eastern European characters would get a “Pro” suffix. Today it’s simple to look at any Adobe OpenType font name and know whether the font’s language support goes beyond Western Europe. (Our East Asian fonts are a different matter, and have their own character collection suffixes.)

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