TypoTechnica 2007

Frank Wildenberg has served as the Managing Director of Linotype®, since September 2006. From December 2005 until September 2006, he served as Director, Sales & Marketing of Linotype. From October 2001 until November 2005, Frank served as Division Manager at Fredenhagen GmbH & Co. KG, a provider of automated materials handling systems. Frank holds a degree in engineering from Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (University of Darmstadt) in Germany and holds a master’s degree in business administration from EAE – Escuela de Administracion de Empresas (EAE Business School) in Barcelona, Spain.

Akira Kobayashi studied at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, and later followed this up with a calligraphy course at the London College of Printing. Since May 2001 Type Director at Linotype Library GmbH. Kobayashi has recently completed Palatino™ nova type family with close collaboration with the original designer Hermann Zapf.
Awards: Best of Category and Best of Show for the Clifford typeface in the 1998 U&lc magazine type design competition. 1st prize, text category for the Conrad typeface in Linotype Library’s 3rd International Digital Type Design Contest. In the Type Directors Club’s type design competitions of 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 – for ITC Woodland, ITC Japanese Garden™ Ornaments and ITC Silvermoon™, FF Clifford, and Linotype Conrad™, respectively.

Design Quality and Automation

(Akira Kobayashi & Atilla Korap)
Do we need to specify design quality?
What could be the quality of design?
Which tools help us to proof design quality?
How do we use them?
The two AKs (Akira Kobayashi and Atilla Korap) from Linotype are trying to give answers to questions that arise when you live in times of technical evolution and artistic diversity.

Atilla Korap studied the humanities and computer sciences. He works at Linotype since 2000. After being at Linotype as an intern for nearly two years, Linotype hired him full time in 2002. He defines font production processes and uses Python, several Libraries, and FontLab® to automate them. Furthermore he consults customers and software developers when it comes to Font Technology.
Outside of Linotype Atilla loves riding his road bike and music.

The Python FontIO Library and some Examples of its Usage

(Dave Opstad & Atilla Korap)
Do we need to specify design quality?
Dave Opstad will explain the FontIO Python-Library, that he has been developing over the last couple of years.
Besides the class hierarchy, and the funcional construction of the Library, he will demonstrate some routines within FontIOI that allow interesting manipulation of font data.
Atilla Korap has used the FontIO Library in his Python scripts to manipulate font data. He will show some of these scripts and explain how and why FontIO makes it easy to overwork any data in SFNT based fonts.

Tobias Meyerhoff, a specialist in internet technology, joined Linotype in 1995. Since 2004 he is in charge of the latest stroke of genius: Linotype FontExplorer™ X.

Linotype FontExplorer

This talk will be about the system integration of FontExplorer technology and how to make use of it.

Jörg Schweinsberg studied mechanical engineering with focus on production engineering at the University of Hannover, Germany, before he started his career at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG in Wiesloch. He held various positions such as management assistant, project leader and head of design consulting before he became the head of process and quality management at Linotype GmbH in 1999.
Since then he has been responsible for the continuous enhancement of process automation and quality assurance for font development among other areas.

Workshop: Next Generation Font Formats

Do we need to specify design quality?
What are the weak points of OpenType™?
What should be done to get typographic features more functional?
Fonts and 3D capabalities?
Demands from Non-Latin language and new electronical devices?

Dave Opstad has been programming computers since the 1960s, and has been working with multilingual typographic issues for nearly as long. He is one of the inventors of Unicode™, TrueType™, GX Line Layout and FontSync, and currently has nine patents to his name.
When he isn’t working on font tools, he enjoys watching animation and reading fantasy and science fiction. You can find him in great bookstores (new and used) most weekends.

“The Python fontio library and some examples of its usage”

(Dave Opstad & Atilla Korap)
Dave Opstad will explain the FontIO Python-Library, that he has been developing over the last couple of years.
Besides the class hierarchy, and the funcional construction of the Library, he will demonstrate some routines within FontIOI that allow interesting manipulation of font data.
Atilla Korap has used the FontIO Library in his Python scripts to manipulate font data. He will show some of these scripts and explain how and why FontIO makes it easy to overwork any data in SFNT based fonts.

Check this topic again, more details to follow shortly.

Christopher has written software for everything from chemical plants to cell phones, and now has the good fortune to work at Monotype™ Imaging where he combines his software experience with his interest in writing systems of the world.
When he isn’t writing software, Christopher enjoys playing music on a variety of musical instruments, especially Renaissance lute and Hindustani bansuri.

Indic Scripts: Challenges and Solutions

Introduction to the 10 major Indic scripts, their family tree and structural similarities

Brief description of the LANGUAGES (they’re NOT dialects darnit!) that use these scripts

Description of the various ways in which grapheme clusters form and the script features involved

Description of some of the challenges of rendering Indic grapheme clusters, how OpenType tables + shaping engines like WTLE/Uniscribe address this

Description of the challenges of cell phone display height constraints vs. Indic glyph stacking and how Monotype’s Fonts-In-A-Box addresses this

Description of some of the challenges of glyph recognition at smaller sizes (e.g. on cell phones) and how designer choices can address this (e.g. using half-forms rather than more complex ligatures, etc.).

Before coming to Adobe®, Thomas Phinney taught typography at RIT in New York. He is Adobe’s Product Manager for Fonts & Typography, in which capacity he helps direct the non-retail aspects of Adobe’s type program. Thomas is well-known for his work in a number of on-line forums, and serves on the ATypI board of directors. He’s completing his first typeface family for Adobe.

Lessons from Facelift

Adobe is revising all its OpenType fonts (nearly 3000). Besides font-specific bug fixes, this work incorporates our latest thinking about "best practices" - what’s important in areas like layout features, encodings and glyph sets. Thomas
Phinney will talk about the issues that drive these changes, and how these "best practices" can apply to other developers’ fonts.

What’s in a name?

Following his overview on Adobe’s OpenType library revision, Thomas Phinney will go into detail about the growing set of considerations that apply to names used in fonts. The various font names themselves, as well as glyph names,
contribute significantly to a fonts’ functionality. This is a chance to get all your
naming questions sorted out in one convenient session.

Miguel Sousa is a graduate of the MA program in Type Design at Reading, and won a TDC2 award last year for his Colouste typeface design. He now works with Adobe Systems, where he helps develop new fonts and is quickly becoming the person to
ask for technical questions.

Font production at Adobe

Miguel Sousa will describe the tools and processes Adobe uses to turn typeface designs into world-class font software, and explain why Adobe does things the ay they do. He’ll focus on off-the-shelf tools and tools available in Adobe’s free FDK, showing how anyone can apply these tools in similar ways to improve the quality of fonts.

State-of-the-art font QE

Following his description of Adobe’s development process, Miguel Sousa will describe the tools & processes Adobe uses to test fonts. He’ll explain the three basic types of font testing, and the reasons Adobe does each part the way they do. The focus will be on tools that are available to general font developers, with the aim of helping developers see how to apply these pieces to their own development situations.

Dr. Jürgen Willrodt
Jürgen Willrodt was born in Hamburg in 1950. He studied Physics and Mathematics and got a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics in 1976, after which he did several years research in that field. Willrodt joined URW 1983 as a software developer. He has been the main developer of the IKARUS font production system since 1985, developing interpolation, autotracing, and hinting algorithms as well as special algorithms for Kanji separation. Since 1995 he has been managing director at URW++ and responsible for font production and font tools development (IKARUS and DTL FontMaster).

Status of OpenType support 2007
The presentation will summarize the status of OpenType support in different applications and on different platforms. We will give an overview of the feature support, the existing bugs, problems and shortcomings related to OpenType fonts. The following issues will be covered in detail and will be demonstrated:

Unicode support, Glyph naming and Encoding problems

Fontnames and platform compatibility

GSUB vs. KERN : Kerning support

Ascender, Descender and Linespacing

Overview of feature support in different Applications for different scripts and languages

Summary


Frank E. Blokland
Type designer and Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Frank E. Blokland founded the Dutch Type Library in 1990, the first and nowadays largest producer and publisher of digital typefaces in the Netherlands. A couple of years later he initiated and supervised the development of DTL FontMaster, a set of utilities for professional font production developed by DTL and URW++. Blokland has designed typefaces like DTL Documenta, DTL Documenta Sans, DTL Haarlemmer (on the basis of drawings by Jan van Krimpen), DTL Haarlemmer Sans and DTL Romulus (also based on drawings by Jan van Krimpen). Currently he is doing a PhD study at Leiden University, in which harmonic systems in type and music play a central role.


Dr. Jürgen Willrodt and Frank E. Blokland
Two sessions on DTL FontMaster.

1. With DTL FontMaster the generation of the GPOS and GSUB features can be automated. The system makes use of the Adobe OT SDK code and hence supports the Adobe syntax. A close look at the structure, advantages and possibilities of this system will be presented. Amongst other things, the interaction between the OT layout features file and the character layout file (.cha) will be explained in detail.

2. Manual digitizing via a Wacom tablet with lens cursor is now supported by the Windows™ version of DTL IkarusMaster. In an era of blunt type tweaking nothing stands in the way of a revival of true craftsmanship anymore. Auto tracing and manual digitizing will be compared.

“Stunning stuff: creating and using photofonts”
Adam Twardoch, Yuri Yarmola

(60 minutes, *Windows* lab)

Photofonts are bitmap fonts with full-color and transparency support, allowing spectacular typographic effects that go well beyond the traditional typography. Today, photofonts can be used today through Fontlab Ltd.’s free Photofont Start plugin in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Corel Painter and other applications on Mac OS X and Windows. They can be also used on mobile devices with Em2 Solutions’ XcgfK font rendering system. Plugins for other applications are under development. Creating photofonts has been easy with Fontlab Ltd.’s BitFonter. Since photofonts are publicly-documented XML files, it is even possible to make them in a text editor, or programatically. In 2007, Fontlab Ltd. will release BitFonter 3, a significantly extended version the professional bitmap font editor, for both Mac® and Windows.
Designers familiar with FontLab Studio will feel instantly at home with BitFonter 3. In our presentation, we will demonstrate some exciting scenarios for how to create and use photofonts.

“Make yourself comfortable: organizing and customizing your Mac font development environment”

(60 minutes, Mac lab, Adam Twardoch)
When developing fonts, a number of different tools and applications can be integrated into your workflow. FontLab Studio 5 can be the centerpiece of your font development environment, but there is a number of other Mac tools (as well as some Windows tools) that can be pulled into the equation. Many of those tools are free, many are also cross-platform.
Python, RoboFab, FontTools/TTX, FontQA, Adobe FDK for OpenType (AFDKO), Apple™ Font Tools for OS X, Microsoft® Font Validator, Microsoft VOLT. In this session, we will show how to set up your FontLab Studio 5 working environment, install additional 3rd party font development tools, link them together and make them available in FLS. We will also discuss the various special folder locations of FontLab Studio and explain where to put macros, encodings and other essential data files.

“Kerning hell: why OpenType kerning can be cumbersome and how to deal
with it”

(60 minutes, Mac or Windows lab, Adam Twardoch & Yuri Yarmola)
The OpenType font format brings a number of new ways to deal with kerning. OpenType fonts can have very large character sets, and often need thousands or even tens of thousands of kerning pairs. Unfortunately, the OpenType kerning model has some significant limitations and intrinsic problems, and implementations across applications vary. Some applications only understand “old-style flat kern table kerning” while others understand “new-style OpenType GPOS kerning”. We will explain what these things are, how to deal with different types of kerning in your font, what to do if you run into subtable overflows and other annoyances. We will show how to effectively use class kerning during your design process and also in font development. We will mention what Adobe, Microsoft and Apple currently think about kerning and how all these strategies can be realized using FontLab Studio.

“Crystal clear: tuning your fonts for screen”

(60 minutes, Windows lab, Yuri Yarmola)
Even though screen resolutions become bigger and the font rasterizers more sophisticated, the need for optimizing font screen quality does not entirely go away. FontLab Studio 5 brings various general font screen quality parameters such as alignment zones and standard stems, which can be automatically or manually edited to achieve best results. In addition to the PostScript® autohinter built into FontLab Studio 5, there is now also the new Adobe autohinter that is available as part of the AFDKO package and integrates into FLS as a macro (more native integration is planned for a future release of FLS). Finally, the manual tools for working with hinting in FLS5 are virtually unchallenged. We will explain how to combine both automatic and manual hinting to quickly achieve best results.

Peter Constable has served Microsoft since August 2003 as a Program Manager for font technologies and international text. He has worked for over ten years in font, text and software internationalization with a particular interest in enablement of non-Latin scripts, and has been an active contributor in the development of the Unicode and ISO 639 standards. As part of the Microsoft Typography team, Peter works on Windows technologies for fonts and international text, including Uniscribe and OpenType.

Font Infrastructure in Windows Vista: The New and Not So New

This presentation will review innovations in the font and text infrastructure in Windows Vista. It will also describe challenges the Microsoft Typography team faces in providing font solutions in a large product with lots of legacy. Remaining gaps and opportunities for the future will also be explored.

Originally from Saint-Petersburg, Russia, Sergey joined Microsoft in 1999. He is a software design engineer working on OpenType font support in Microsoft products including Windows, Uniscribe, Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Office. One of his recent projects was a development of new math layout engine and math font specification for Microsoft Office. Sergey is also responsible for development of Microsoft font production tools, such as Microsoft Visual OpenType Layout Tool (VOLT).

High-level text layout: What OpenType can and can’t do for you.

OpenType layout format is an open, powerful glyph substitution and positioning mechanism. But it has limitations when it goes beyond the level of simple glyph transformations. We will discuss some examples of such text layout features including complex scripts, line breaking, justification and math layout.

Carolyn came to the font world from graphic design and digital pre-press. Starting in the mid 80’s she worked for several years at a small full-service commercial printer in Eastern Washington. She learned to love typography and fonts during the transition from image setters to desktop publishing. At Microsoft Carolyn has worked as a tester, learning how to make sense of font tables and how to edit them. As a Program Manager Carolyn is now responsible for East Asian and South East Asian scripts including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Khmer, Tibetan and Mongolian.

Matching metrics: considerations in fonts for multi-script scenarios

In a Global product such as Windows, is the use of multiple scripts in software UI, browsers, documents and e-mail is the norm for many users. The way these scripts work together has become increasingly important while font metrics and rendering systems have remained relatively unchanged. This presentation will review some of the issues currently being seen with font metrics, how some have been addressed in Windows Vista and may be addressed in the future.

Thomas Merz is President of PDFlib GmbH, the company he founded in 2000 in Munich. PDFlib GmbH develops software tools for the server-centric generation and processing of PDF documents and distributes it worldwide.
Since completing his studies in mathematics and computer science, Thomas Merz has been occupied with graphical data processing and digital typography. He has published several books on PostScript, PDF and fonts and often speaks about these topics at international conferences. Furthermore he has been a consultant for cryptography and internet security and lectured at the universities of Augsburg and Jena on these topics.

The art and science of PDF Text extraction

Why it’s so hard to reliably extract text from PDF (and how you can help)

Copying text from a PDF document is useful if you want to repurpose some text, and it’s a crucial operation for search engines. Last but not least, reliable text extraction is required by the international
archiving standard PDF/A.
However, PDF text extraction can be painful at times: bullets look funny, ligatures get lost, or the company logo extracts as “ABC”. In the worst case the clipboard receives only garbage, but no useful text at all. In this presentation we will review text extraction problems with various real-world PDF documents. The culprit may be the font or the application, the driver or the PDF creation software. Or something else?
The talk will explain how these problems can be approached on various levels. I will also present a new free Acrobat plugin which improves text extraction from PDF, and can be used as a testing tool.

Christian Schwartz (b. 1977) is an independent type designer living and working in New York City, where he is principal of Schwartzco Inc., and a partner in Orange Italic. Schwartz has created proprietary typefaces for corporations and publications all over the world, and has released commercial fonts through many leading digital foundries.

We’re halfway there
As a working type designer, Christian Schwartz is caught in the middle between design, technology, clients, and readers. This has given him an interesting vantage point from which to observe shifting expectations and priorities, especially at publications, as OpenType has been widely adopted. Schwartz’s keynote address will attempt to look into the future with mostly boundless optimism.

Born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea, Seonil took the first step into the world of linguistic symbols by learning how to read and write Hangul, a firm base in exploring and developing diverse sorts of scripts. Her work involves not only with integrating Latin and non-Latin design methodologies and aesthetics but also with bridging sound composition and type design based on a common numeric platform. She is currently attending the Type and Media course at KABK.

Beyond Dichotomy: Matching Latin with Abrakadabra
Increasing global distribution network and interdependence require typographers and type designers to work with multilingual texts of diverse formats on different media. Especially the scripts from Far East demand a specific knowledge about the respective typographic rules and cultures. This session investigates possible processes of typographic due diligence in designing matching Latin typefaces for CJK fonts.