The "circus-poster" style Madame and the Garamond-like Sabon Next have both gotten OpenType face-lifts. Also: the father of OCR dies at age 84.Linotype GmbH has released two more type families from its collection in OpenType, the ISO standard initially jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe. THe type families are Madame, an ornamental font reminiscent of "Wild West" and circus-poster related motifs; and Sabon Next, a modern serifed font derived from Garamond.
Madame is based on a 19th century wood-type font from the Founderie Typographique Francaise. It was used primarily for poster advertising. The OpenType version of the font allows for easier use of multiple colors in a layered application of the typeface, which required conversion of the type into graphics to achieve with Postscript and TrueType versions of the font.
The other re-released font is Sabon Next. A "revival of a revival", the typeface was designed in 2002 by Jean Francois Porchez, vice-president of
ATypI, the international typographic association, as a refresh of Sabon, a revival of the Garamond typeface created by Jan Tschichold in 1967.
Father of OCR dies at age 84
David H. Shepard, the man responsible for one of the most familiar fonts in the world and inventor of optical character recognition technology, died November 24. He originally sketched out what would become the Farrington B numeric font--used for the numbers on credit cards--on a cocktail napkin at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Shepard's other work included a patented "Conversation Machine", the first interactive voice response system, and, more recently, developments in high-altitude wind turbine systems.
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