[metapost] Strange infont results

[Karl Berry]

    So I've taken this as a warning using pcrr8r 

I hope not.

When I was updating the metapost documentation, I was told by someone
(you?  Sorry, my brain is fried) that miktex does not supply pcrr, and
therefore it was better to use pcrr8r in the examples.  So I did.  As
long as you stick to plain ASCII input and use control sequences for
accents, it shouldn't be an issue.  If you want to use 8-bit input,
things get more complicated.

    But would pcrr mean pcrr8a or pcrr8r or something else?

Something else.  Ever since the beginning of dvips, pcrr and the like
have referred to a homegrown "character set" following the "dvips"
encoding, which is more or less what Tom Rokicki made afm2tfm do by
default back when he first wrote it.

    Are there good reasons not to include those map file entries by default?

I don't know of a good reason to ever use the Adobe Standard Encoding
(*8a), therefore *8a.tfm fonts are not included in the distributions,
therefore *8a entries are not included in the map files.