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I want to offer my sincere thanks to Thomas Phinney for all the work he put into this blog. But despite his absence, "the blog must go on." Everyone on the Adobe Type Development team will be contributing interesting bits about fonts and type technology. Some of them may be unfamiliar to some of you, so I'll take this opportunity to offer a brief introduction.

Robert Slimbach has been designing typefaces for 25 years. He's responsible for the design quality of the type library in general and the Adobe Originals series in particular. Robert's designs have won numerous awards, including the Prix Charles Peignot and six TDC2 awards. He was instrumental in moving Adobe's fonts toward broader language coverage, and was an early promoter for contextual layout and support for optical sizes in text families. designer profile

Ken Lunde is an authority on East Asian text handling and font technologies. His book "CJKV Information Processing", now in its second edition, is a standard reference in the industry (catalog). Among many other accomplishments, Ken helped to define Unicode's first Ideographic Variation Sequence registry.

Read Roberts develops and maintains the tools we use to make our fonts, including the AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) that we offer for free download (AFDKO site).

Nicole Minoza is our program manager, moving various projects along when she's not running marathons or doing programming herself. She was a Political Science major (with a side in Computer Science) and is now working on her MBA.

Ernie March has worked on fonts for 25 years, many of them at Adobe. He handles most of our font testing, doubles as our release engineer, and occasionally finds time to help with font development.

Gu Hua is a recent addition to the team. She has worked on East Asian fonts for more than 12 years. Now she tests our East Asian fonts and related technologies.

Christopher Slye is the team lead for font development. He's both a typeface designer and font technician. He maintains the databases we use to build our fonts, and was responsible for overhauling all our fonts to bring them up to current best practices. designer profile

Miguel Sousa got his MA in Typeface Design in 2005 from the University of Reading, where his Calouste design won a TDC2 award. He helps develop our newer font families, and is our in-house expert on Flash & Flex. Miguel serves as the main "answer guy" for font technical questions both inside and outside the company in forums like Typophile.

Paul D. Hunt became fascinated with languages and cultures early in life. This eventually led to a BA in International Studies. Paul's affinity for languages and design then converged in typeface design. He landed an internship with P22, which turned into a multi-year job. Paul went on to hone his type craft at the University of Reading, where he graduated with merit from the Masters program in Typeface Design in 2008, then joined the Adobe team in January 2009. In addition to basic Latin, Paul has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari and typefaces with extended Latin coverage to support African and American Indian languages. He is a frequent contributor to (and moderator for) Typophile, and helps maintain its wiki.

And of course I'm here too. I fell in love with letterforms in the 1970s, which led to a degree in graphic design. After working in the publishing industry I joined the Adobe type team in 1986, and have been involved with our font development, tools and technologies ever since. I originally hoped to design type, but found I could make more of a difference managing the team and doing things like helping to define the behavior of OpenType layout features.

Adobe also has a Type Development team in Tokyo, led by Taro Yamamoto with font technologist Masataka Hattori and typeface designer Ryoko Nishizuka. designer profile We'll have more about their work in another post.

We're all looking forward to more communication with each of you as our work here continues to evolve.

- David Lemon

The main reason for having combining accents in a font is if you also have mark attachment information in the same font, so as to actually support positioning the diacritic relative to a base letter.

Currently none of Adobe's western fonts support this functionality. There are several reasons for this:

1) Prior to InDesign CS3, none of Adobe's flagship creative graphics/publishing applications supported mark attachment in the regular western version.

2) Adobe's FDK (and thus FontLab) don't yet support mark attachment, so it was not easy for us to do in OpenType CFF fonts.

3) it's more challenging to do the contextual kerning required to kern these dynamically combined accented letters.

So, with InDesign CS3 out, we now have an Adobe app that can use this functionality.

Moving forwards, for most of the language support we have done before, we will continue to use prcomposed accents. But for more extended language support, which we are starting to work on now, we will use OpenType mark attachment ('mark', 'mkmk' and 'mlig' features as appropriate).

As you might guess from that, we'll be enabling this by adding support for mark attachment to our own Adobe FDK for OpenType, which also yields source code for FontLab and DTL FontMaster. I can't give you a clear timeline, but I'll say that the fact we want to use the functionality ourselves increases the priority of getting it into our tools.