Linotype TypoTechnica 2005

Linotypes TypoTechnica 2005 conference at Londons St. Bride Printing Library was an intimate gathering of renowned type designers, industry-leading font technicians, small Internet font foundry owners, and students. All came to garner the latest updates from the world of font technology, and the program did not disappoint.

After an enthusiastic greeting from Linotype and the St. Bride staff, Matthew Carter gave the conferences keynote address, asking those in attendance, "why do we need new fonts?" The answer of course, is that technology and communications media change almost daily, and that each development places new demands on type and typography.

At the top of the list of industry presenters was Quark, Inc., who gave their first public preview of QuarkXPress 7.0s new typographic features. Including a completely new type engine based on Unicode, Quark 7 will support the use of new OpenType Format fonts. These can include up to 64,000 glyphs, a significant increase from the PostScript/TrueType character set of 256. Quark Inc.s Gavin Drake stated, "this upgrade represents the biggest change to Quark XPress in the last 10 years."

Other than familiar interface elements more or less familiar to users of OpenType-savvy applications, like the glyph palette, an interesting OpenType-related feature in Quark XPress 7.0 will be Font Fallback. If a text is opened that contains Unicode-encoded characters that are not present within the selected font, Quark XPress will automatically search through all fonts installed on a computer to find a font with those characters in it; the characters in question will be set in that font instead. Users who want to maintain exact control over their documents text may turn off the Font Fallback feature in their Preferences menu.

Microsofts Paul Nelson reaffirmed his companys commitment to OpenType: using Unicode technology, Microsoft is committed to making their products support all of the worlds writing systems.

Adobe Inc. is also behind the OpenType revolution: since 2003, all Adobe fonts have been available in that format. Per David Lemon, who at the end of the conference received the first-ever Linotype Font Technology Award for his decades-long work as a font developer, Adobe will stop distributing PostScript Type 1 fonts altogether by the end of 2005.
Reviews of PDF technology and font embedding/protection, as well as a discussion about the inclusion of customer-licensing data into a font rounded out the first day of the conference.

The second, and final day of the conference began with another big announcement: the American font foundry House Industries has recently purchased the Photo Lettering Inc. archive, and has begun a joint venture with several designers/programmers to create a new way to buy type and lettering over the internet. Just as in the days of photo typesetting, customers will now be able to buy headline text by the word. Using the latest font programming technology, House will release a new website that will allow customers to set their own headlines complete with color, effects, layers, and alternate glyphs that they will be able purchase as vector PDFs.
Picking up on a topic from the first afternoon, Linotypes managing director, Bruno Steinert, spent the second day discussing concerns about Digital Rights Management. Aside from reminding attendees of the industrys need to protect customer privacy, Steinert stressed that font foundry websites must become increasingly easier to use in the future.

Running parallel to almost all of the above presentations were hands-on workshops offered by FontLab, Inc, and font technology scripting presentations, like the RoboFab demonstration showed in the photo above.

Further day two sessions included discussion about extended character sets for use in Eastern Europe, new possibilities for Arabic type design brought about through OpenType, and a new Unicode wiki being designed by the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, that will soon go public.

Aside from these organized events, Linotype organized evening entertainment activities in the city, and a tour of the St. Bride Printing Librarys collection.