Peter Rosenfeld URW++ Design & Development GmbH Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Much of the actual font technology finds its origin in the IKARUS system, invented by Dr. Peter Karow in the early 1970’s and developed till this day by URW++ Design & Development GmbH under supervision of Dr. Jürgen Willrodt. A historical overview and explanation of more than thirty years of Spitzentechnologie by URW++’s managing director, who was directly engaged in the IKARUS development over the past thirty-five years.

Peter Rosenfeld started, after finishing his business studies in 1980, his first position in the font production department at Dr. Hell in Kiel. It was there where he first got in touch with digital type. Peter joined URW Software & Type GmbH in Hamburg in 1982 and a little later he became the manager of the URW font studio. He worked very closely for and with Dr. Peter Karow, the visioneer and pioneer of the type industry. Roughly ten years after joining URW, Peter became Managing Director of URW++ Design & Development GmbH and the company has established itself in the graphic design industry by continually developing and marketing innovative font products and related software.

Dr. Peter Karow Formerly URW Software & Type GmbH, Adobe Systems Inc., & AdFinder GmbH Play (44min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Digital Typography transpired in type design and text layout. It has changed font production and text composition in their entirety. Dr. Karow was involved in many of the demands for digital typefaces which came into existence from 1972 through 1997. These issues included formats, variations, interpolation, rasterizing, hinting, autotracing, grayscaling, and element separation. Modern text composition was mostly influenced by programs such as WordStar, Word, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and FrameMaker, which replaced writing, typesetting and printing in offices on the one hand and at home on the other.

In current times, text is composed much less manually than in the past, but not as digitally generated as its potential. Within modern text composition, digital text is a special part that should proceed without manual assistance and human layout. Up to now, the milestones were these: kerning, optical scaling, paragraph composition (hz-program), chapter composition (chapter fit), and digital ads. As is known, a good deal of engineering endeavors has already been implemented in regards to digital typography. However, distinct challenges still exist such as refinements to autotracing, autohinting, element separation, kerning, optical scaling, chapter fit, and automatic text composition. Many sophisticated tasks are still left to be executed, they belong more to artificial intelligence than to engineering.
 
Peter Karow was born as a farmer’s son in Stargard, Pomerania, on November 11, 1940. From school and after his civil service he progressed to the University of Hamburg, to study high energy physics leading to a dissertation in 1971. With Rubow and Weber he founded the company URW Software & Type GmbH. Digital type became his life’s work and has continued to be a most enjoyable and exciting task to the present day.

Several contacts with type designers, especially Hermann Zapf, had great impact on his development of the IKARUS program. Since 1988, both worked on the ‘hz-progam’ in order to use the power of computers to improve the micro-typography of texts.

Peter Karow gave international presentations on numerous conferences, wrote many articles for journals, got 14 patents for DTP related methods, and wrote several books, among them: Digital Typefaces and Font Technology (both Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York, 1994), Typeface Statistics (URW Verlag, Hamburg, 1993).

John Hudson Tiro Typeworks Play (75min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Individual scholars, scholarly associations and academic publishers regularly deal with texts whose needs, in terms of character set, complex layout and typographic refinement, exceed those of everyday font use and, hence, of most fonts. John Hudson examines some of these needs and the solutions provided by specialised and custom typefaces, using three projects as examples: SBL Hebrew (for the Society of Biblical Literature), Cambria Math (for Microsoft), and the new Brill family of types (for Royal Brill). The Brill project, which is in progress, illustrates the impact of both specialist user needs and a 325 year publishing tradition on design decisions, as well as the latest technical solutions to typesetting complex and unusual texts.

John Hudson is a type designer and co-founder of Tiro Typeworks. Since 1997, he has specialised in the design and development of custom fonts for multilingual computing and publishing. Tiro Typework’s clients include Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Linotype, as well as many smaller companies, academic associations and minority language communities. In addition to his type design activities, John writes and lectures on font technology issues.

Dr. Jürgen Willrodt URW++ Design & Development GmbH Play (68min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

This presentation will summarize the status of OpenType support in different applications and on different platforms. It will give an overview of the OT Layout features support, the existing bugs, problems and shortcomings related to OpenType fonts.

Dr. Jürgen Willrodt studied Physics and Mathematics and got a PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1976. Jürgen joined URW Software & Type GmbH in 1983 as a software developer. His first major development project was the porting of the IKARUS font production system from DEC to Sun Unix. He has been the main developer of the IKARUS system since 1985, developing interpolation, auto-tracing and hinting algorithms as well as special algorithms for Kanji separation. Since 1995 Jürgen is managing director at URW++ Design & Development GmbH and responsible for font production and font tools development, amongst which IKARUS and DTL FontMaster.

Frank E. Blokland Dutch Type Library Play (52min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Not only font production processes can be automated (with DTL FontMaster); to a certain extend also the type design process can be done by software itself. Blokland will give an introduction on the (possible) automation of type design processes and a presentation of the most recent version of the DTL LetterModeller application.

This presentation is partly based on the PhD research on Harmonic Systems in the Latin Script, which the speaker is currently doing at Leiden University.
 
Frank E. Blokland is type designer (of, amongst others, DTL Documenta and DTL Haarlemmer), Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague since 1987 and Professor at the Plantin Society in Antwerp since 1995. Frank founded the Dutch Type Library in 1990. A couple of years later he initiated and supervised the development of DTL FontMaster, a set of tools for the professional font production, developed together with URW++ Design & Development GmbH.

Currently Frank is doing a PhD study at Leiden University, in which harmonic systems in type and music and the automation of type design processes play a central role.

Thomas Milo DecoType Play (72min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | mp3

Tasmeem provides a platform for both modern and traditional Arabic, capturing the accumulated expertise of past calligraphers and typographers as a plug-in to applications such as the Middle Eastern version of Adobe InDesign. For typesetting Arabic Tasmeem is far more versatile than what OpenType can offer.

Thomas Milo is the founder of DecoType, the first in the industry to introduce the concept of intelligent fonts (Ruq’ah 1986) and to develop Arabic script solutions based on thorough research into the Islamic calligraphic tradition. Decotype contributes fonts and Arabic Calligraphy applications to Microsoft Office Arabic Edition and to Adobe PageMaker Middle East, and provides a special interface for Calligraphic typesetting; they provide Arabic fonts for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and WinSoft-Adobe InDesign ME. For years DecoType worked closely together in research and development with Tradigital (UK, Germany, Egypt), in the context of which DT produced the typeface in which the complete traditions of the prophet (hadith) have been printed. Together with WinSoft all features of ACE were built into InDesign resulting in Tasmeem.

Thomas Milo DecoType Play (6min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

The second Dr. Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography has been awarded to Thomas Milo for the development of the ACE layout engine (the heart of the Tasmeem plugin for InDesign ME) for Arabic text setting. More»