TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:40:17 EST 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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Laurence Penney
Laurence Penney (born Isleworth, London, 1969, based in Bristol, UK) is a digital type specialist and dynamic (or variable) font technology expert, who has his own blog. His work has had a major impact on the type technology world we know today. At university (B.Sc. Computer Science) he created a prototype parametric font system, and wrote that it was a weird and unusable font production system, proving to himself that over-automation of type design is a Bad Thing. He was involved in Type Chimerique: Type Chimirique (formerly Kendrick Digital Typography) is a small organization dedicated to digital fontology. In other words, we specialize in everything to do with digital type. We design, hint and customize type to your requirements---avoiding automatic systems whenever there's a suspicion of inferior quality, writing our own tools where existing ones aren't enough. We're particularly into TrueType, and take commissions for writing custom TrueType (and OpenType) editing tools---for glyph outlines and other parts of the font file. We also design, adapt and hint and Type 1 fonts. From 1993 onwards, he went freelance and (in his own words) divined the black art of TrueType hinting, tweaking fonts for Microsoft, Linotype and indie designers. In 1999 he was hired as a founder member of MyFonts, at the time only an idea within Bitstream (Cambridge, MA). He enlarged the team and helped the company to become market leader by a wide margin. In particular, he helped create the site's unique balance between newbie appeal and an extensive typographic resource. He developed MyFonts.com's in-house software, contributed editorial content, and co-managed the distributor's contacts with foundries and designers. At ATypI 2004 in Prague, Penney spoke about EULAs. From 2016 he has been a consultant in variable fonts. He presents aspects of the technology at conferences and universities, and wrote the open source Fit-to-Width library. His Axis-Praxis website (2016-present) is the first place that anyone can play with variable fonts. Laurence also lectures on font technology at typographic conferences and is visiting lecturer at Reading University. Speaker at ATypI 2019 in Tokyo on the topic of Parametric Fallback Fonts for the Web. Related to that talk, he set up FauxFoundry with Irene Vlachou in 2019. FauxFoundry provides tools for providing Greek fonts that match a Latin counterpart. |
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file name: Laurence Penney Irene Vlachou Pic 2019
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |