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ABOUT

DecoType [Thomas Milo]

Thomas Milo founded DecoType in Amsterdam in 1985, together with Peter Somers and Mirjam Somers. They introduced the notion of dynamic fonts, and developed Ruqaa (1987), licensed by Microsoft. They also developed the DecoTypeSetter, which was included in Adobe PageMaker MiddleEast. Deco Type is perhaps best known for its extensive DTP Naskh family, which has hundreds of variations of all letterforms, and permitted people to typeset calligraphic Arabic, as it is in a style emulating the hand of the Ottoman calligrapher Mustafa Izzet Efendi. Part of that package is the DecoType Authentic Naskh typeface. DecoType donated a custom version of Naskh to the Unicode Consortium for printing the Arabic parts of their manuals. Other fonts include DTP Nastaaliq. Thomas Milo is also a specialist of Turkic and Slavic linguistics. His company's beautiful fonts sell for 125 USD: P.O. Box 55518, 1007 NA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Thomas Milo's talks about Arabic fonts at the 1998 RIDT in Saint-Malo and at ATypI in Copenhagen in 2001 were masterful performances---entertaining and insightful from start to finish. From Milo's site: DecoType contributes fonts and Arabic Calligraphy applications to Microsoft Office Arabic Edition; to Adobe PageMaker Middle East DecoType provides a special interface for Calligraphic typesetting; to the MacOS 9 it contributes Arabic fonts.

In 2009, Thomas Milo received the second Dr. Peter Karow Award for Font Technology&Digital Typography for the development of the ACE layout engine (the heart of the Tasmeem plugin for InDesign ME) for Arabic text setting. The citation reads: Thomas Milo and his company DecoType developed with ACE, which is an acronym for 'Arabic Calligraphic Engine', new advanced technology for Arabic text setting, which needs a far more sophisticated approach than for instance the Latin script, based on a thorough analysis of the Arabic script. Not only served Milo's typographic research as the fundament for the ACE technology, clearly it also formed a basis for the development of the OpenType format, although this is a less known and acknowledged fact.

In 2017, he developed the new electronic Mus'haf Muscat at the behest of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman.

Speaker at ATypI 2010 in Dublin. Speaker at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik. Speaker at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam. MyFonts page. Speaker at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg.

Personal link.

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