CAB@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (Chuck Bigelow) (06/30/87)
Peter Karow, a pioneer in the development of digital font formats, intelligent font scaling, digitization software systems, and related digital type technology, has just published a compendium of the knowledge and ideas he has gained over the past 14 years of fontological inquiry. There is nothing else so thorough and thoughtful on the practical technical aspects of industrial digital type. (Of course, Knuth's A - E series is comprehensive, and more tightly woven into a seamless Web, so to speak, but it is oriented more toward theory, and in particular toward his own TeX and Metafont systems, with an academic emphasis.) Karow's IKARUS software is used by most of the major typeface manufacturers, and IKARUS data has become a de facto standard for exchange in the type industry. The book is DIGITAL FORMATS for TYPEFACES, by Peter Karow, URW Verlag, Kreienkoppel 55, 2000 Hamburg 65, West Germany. 400 pp., illustrations In the U.S., order from URW, Inc. 1 Tara Boulevard / Suite 210 Nashua, NH 03062 tel: (603) 882-7445 Price: Single copy -- $44.00 each additional copy -- $20.00 As the price is rather high, it might make a good addition to an academic or corporate library where it can be shared. Topics discused include: Typeface Terminology Visual Display devices Typesetting Machines NC (numerically controlled) machines Type Structure Form setting Hierarchical formal structure Review of Formats Bitmaps Bytemaps Run lengths Open vectors Closed Vectors Curved lines (splines, etc.) Special coding techniques The URW IKARUS formats and conversions Scanning Storage requirements Time required to digitize typefaces Type classification Character sets Accents Optical effects Data structures for formats: spline arc & vector vector run length bitmap & others Kerning tables