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Here is another try that addresses the issues raisd by Martin Loewis. It adds a new argument to Font.__init__: exists. If False (the default) then the old behavior occurs unchanged (including an error is raised if the font already exists). If True, the font must already exist. This follows the dictum "explicit is better than implicit".

There is an another issue: what do do about Font's __del__? The existing behavior was for Font.__del__ to delete the associated tk named font. This causes trouble if more than one tkFont.Font object points to the same tk named font object. Even in the existing system it could also cause trouble if the user was doing a mixture of tk and Tkinter programming.

I see two solutions:
- Simple (what I did): do not delete tk named fonts (ditch Font.__del__). This makes it safe to mix tk an Tkinter programming. The only down side is increased memory use for any existing program that creates many tk named fonts and then deletes them. I can't imagine this is a serious issue.
- Fancy: keep a dictionary of each Font object (by font name) as it is created. If a new Font pointing to an existing tk named font is wanted, return the existing Font object. Then the old Font.__del__ is as safe as it ever was.