The new version of Adobe Reader (10.1.3) released last week includes new functionality that allows users to sign documents electronically. This new capability leverages three fonts that we designed and developed in record time. They emulate the real handwriting of some of our team members and are intended to serve as a proxy to anyone’s signature.
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Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Hot on the heels of Todd Macfie’s report on Type Camp India, which I was privileged to attend in December 2009, I decided to publish my experiences from my most recent trip to India. It has been just over two years since I traveled to Chennai for my first visit to India. As part of the Type Camp group, I was there very much in the capacity of learner to study the Tamil script and to document its forms with my own amateur photography.
However, my return trip was to focus on imparting some of the knowledge that I have attained in the intervening years since my initial visit. In particular, I was honored to be able to present at Typography Day 2012. It was an inspiring event to see the state of the art in India in terms of typography, publication design and typeface design. I was somewhat surprised at how much type design was showcased at this conference, which I fully expected to be more focused specifically on typography. It was encouraging to me to see many students active in learning the essentials of type design.
The AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) tools are available only for Mac OS X and Windows, but we have heard some interest in having a Linux version as well. If you would use the AFDKO tools if a Linux version were available, or a version for some platform other than Mac OS X and Windows, please let us know, and for which environment. (Note that only binary versions would be supported for the near future, as the AFDKO tools contain some Adobe intellectual property.)
I am pleased to announce that this year Adobe is one of the sponsors of the Indian Institute of Technology’s Typography Day at its Industrial Design Centre in Mumbai. In connection with this event, I will be presenting on the typesetting capabilities for Indian scripts in Adobe InDesign. This will only be the beginning of my journey….
In order to benefit individuals active in the field of typeface design, I will also be hosting a series of one-day type development workshops in several Indian cities. These workshops will be targeted at helping to foster local type designers and engineers within India and will thus be limited to persons residing in the region.
Twenty five years ago I worked my first day at Adobe. It was quite exciting; there were about 75 people at the company, all crowded in a small building in East Palo Alto. Continue reading…
The Adobe Type team has been wrestling a bit with Shakespeare’s timeless question as we wrap up some newly-enhanced typeface families here.
I have recently returned from the regular trip to Europe I do around this time of the year, where I visit the schools in Reading (England) and in The Hague (Netherlands) that have a masters degree in typeface design. I spend about a week in each location, doing a workshop with the students which focuses on using the software tools available in our Font Development Kit.
Despite the amount of work involved, this is an event I enjoy very much doing: I get to interact with students, see their projects, teach them a few things, provide advice and feedback, and also learn some things from them. It’s definitely a win-win situation for everyone involved: the students, the teachers, the schools, myself and Adobe.
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OpenType/CFF (.otf file extension) and TrueType (.ttf file extension*) are the two modern font formats available for desktop usage today. Despite being distinct formats, OT/CFF and TT fonts actually have a lot in common. They are distinguished primarily by their different outline formats and the contrasting approaches employed to rasterize those outlines.
The glyph outlines in OT/CFF fonts are made of cubic Bézier paths whereas in TT fonts they’re made of quadratic Béziers.
Two similar paths. Cubic Bézier (left) and quadratic Bézier (right).
Update: We’re excited to have hired not one but two new MA graduates, who’ll be starting at Adobe in January. Watch for a post introducing them later. I want to thank all the people who inquired about the position; it was an impressive group!
- David L
To help keep things fresh, Adobe Systems has a program dedicated to bringing in people just out of college. As part of this program, we now have the opportunity to add someone in the Type team. If you’ve just received your Masters degree or are in your final year, you might be the person we’re looking for. Continue reading…
When Thomas Phinney announced via this blog three years ago that his typeface family was “available,” he left us with a bit of a cliffhanger by telling us that the italics would be forthcoming. Today I can tell you that the wait for the complete family is over. The roman and italic fonts can now be purchased online from our type showroom. We will be offering all of the faces as individual font sales, or available in two packages – one which includes the full family and another which offers only the italics. The package offering only the italics is offered at a special discount of $55 for all the italic fonts (versus $35 per font) and is intended for customers who received Hypatia as a registration incentive and only want the italic faces.
A partial showing of Hypatia Sans Pro Italic
