On the 18th of November 2009, the 4th DTL FontMaster Conference will take place at the five star Steigenberger Kurhaus Hotel in The Hague.

The title is 'Type[&]Design 2009' and the conference is targeted on those who work professionally with type, such as graphic designers, typographers, printers, type designers and font producers. The conference will provide insight in many (technical) aspects of type (design) and font production. Especially the focus will be on OpenType and the support of this font format by operating systems such as Mac OS and Windows and by applications from leading companies, like for instance Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Quark.

Besides the OpenType format also the IKARUS system will have a central place in the conference program, especially because it is now 35 years ago that the era of the digital font production started with this invention by Dr. Peter Karow. Much of the actual font technology, like hinting and kerning, finds its origin in the still actual IKARUS system, on which for instance the DTL FontMaster modules are built.

Dr. Peter Karow will be the guest of honor during the conference and he will also present the second Dr. Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography. Furthermore the new 3.0 edition of DTL FontMaster, which includes the 2.5 version of the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO), and version 1.5 of DTL OTMaster will be presented.

The previous DTL FontMaster Conference took place at Castle Maurick in Vught, nearby 's-Hertogenbosch in 2003. In the past three years the Dutch Type Library organized so called 'FM Tracks' in Lisbon (2006), Brighton (2007) and St. Petersburg (2008), as part of the ATypI TypeTech Forum sessions. So after six years the FM Conference has returned to the Netherlands.

Speakers at the conference are Dr. Peter Karow (Digital Typography and Artificial Intelligence), Dr. Jürgen Willrodt (OpenType Status 2009), Thomas Milo (DecoType, ACE and Tasmeem), John Hudson (Scholarly Types), Peter Rosenfeld (Re-inventing font technology) and Frank E. Blokland (Automating type design processes). All talks will be held in English.

The conference program can be downloaded from http://www.fontmaster.nl/pdf/Type[&]Design_2009.pdf

More information can be found at "http://www.fontmaster.nl/Blogs/FMNews

article posted 19 October 2009 and last updated 19 October 2009.