Fontlab Ltd. has stayed at the forefront of digital font management by remaining devoted to developing font editors and typography products. Their full line of products is dedicated to solving the most complex typography issues. These products include FontLab Studio, Fontographer, AsiaFont Studio, ScanFont, TypeTool, TransType, BitFonter, Photofont and others.

Adam Twardoch is Scripting Products and Marketing Manager at Fontlab Ltd. He also works as a consultant specializing in multilingual typography and font technology for Adobe, Bitstream, Linotype, Monotype, MyFonts and other clients worldwide. 2000-06 he was Board member and country delegate for Poland at Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), of which he remains a member.

Thursday | 04:00 PM | TYPOlab

Some type designers say that when they design a typeface, their primary goal is to design the whitespace between, around and inside of the letters — the letterforms themselves are of secondary importance.It is the intra- and inter-character spacing that creates the rhythm, the flow of the typeface. A well-spaced typeface is readable and pleasing, a poorly-spaced design does not work even if the letterforms are pretty. Type spacing and kerning is a crucial element of the design process. The OpenType font format brings a number of new ways to deal with type metrics and kerning. OpenType fonts can have very large character sets, and often need thousands or even tens of thousands of kerning pairs, and new solutions such as class kerning come to aid.

TypeTool and FontLab Studio, the two leading font editors from Fontlab Ltd., allow aspiring designers to develop new typefaces, and help font users customize their existing fonts (if the EULA permits it). In this presentation, we will discuss some basic principles of spacing and kerning, and we will show the tools and settings in TypeTool and FontLab Studio that can be used to devise optimal metrics and kerning.

Friday | 02:00 PM | TYPOlab

You're working on a magazine spread, a flyer, a poster, a Flash presentation or a website. You're using a body and headline typeface that is nice and clean, very readable, and from a reputable foundry. You really like it. But what if for one headline or a short piece of text, you'd like a variant of that face that is not as nice and clean, but rougher. Or slightly bolder. Or perhaps has a pattern running through. It's easily done in Photoshop or Illustrator directly — if it's a one-off thing. But if it's three headlines, or the same label in four different languages, another way might be worth considering: "scratching" an existing font and creating a typographic remix.

By combining TypeTool 3 and BitFonter 3, two brand-new releases from Fontlab Ltd., it's easily done. In this presentation, we will show you how to take a font to Photoshop, do anything you want with it, and turn the result back into a fully-functional font — all with kerning and OpenType features! As with any derivative works, such scratches and remixes are subject to copyright and licensing restrictions, so we will mention these as well.