We started designing the new font selection scheme around April 1989. A first implementation was available after one month's work and thereafter the prototype version ran successfully for some months at a few sites in Germany and the UK. Frank's visit to Stanford as well as our work on the `amstex' style option brought new aspects to our view. The result was a more or less complete redefinition of the LATEX interface for this font mechanism. It was a long way from the first sketch (which was about five pages in Frank's notebook) to the current implementation of the interface which now consists of nearly 2000 lines of code and about 4000 lines of internal documentation. The project itself, which triggered this reimplemenation, has about the same dimensions. Surely in such a huge software package one will find typos and bugs. But we hope that most of the bugs in the code are found by now. It is planned that the new font selection scheme will replace the old one in LATEX version 2.10. We therefore hope that this pre-release which runs in version 2.09 will help to find all remaining problems so that the switch to version 2.10 will be without discomfort to the user.