\title{BCS ep group meetings}
The next meeting of the BCS ep group
is at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in
London on Wednesday 1st~April and will be
concerned with `Text Management and
Indexing', or `how to help the reader find what
s/he wants'. Topics to be covered will include:
`The way in' to documents; aspects of indexing
and indexing software; databases, both text
and relational; various case studies. 

The next two planned meetings will be on
Thursday 4th June, again at SOAS, when the
topic will be `Input and Output Devices', and
Tuesday 2nd September at Nottingham. The
latter meeting is at the invitation of Professor
David Brailsford and his Electronic
Publishing Research Group and will centre on
the work they are doing. This is mainly in the
area of document structure. It is planned that,
as well as speakers from Nottingham, there
will be other speakers on this topic.

For more details, contact

{\parindent10pt\obeylines
David Penfold
BCS ep Office
30 Edgerton Road
Huddersfield HD3 3AD
tel: 0484 519462}


\bar
\title{Typefaces Meeting}
The BCS Electronic Publishing group held a
meeting  on 15th October 1991 at
the St Bride Foundation Institute (just
off Fleet Street), a suitable
venue in view of its historical relevance to
printing (unfortunately, not so suitable
acoustically, with much of the audience
finding it difficult to hear all the speakers,
having to deal with poor sound dispersion,
echoes, and street sounds!).

Alison Black, who is freelance consultant on
information design, and Paul Stiff of Reading
University (hence, Stiff\&Black) began, with a talk entitled `Cut the
Hype about Type'. They looked at a number
of `received wisdoms', especially those foisted
on us by manufacturers, and compared these
with the customers' requirements. For
example, there is the `democratic fallacy' --
everyone will be able to have typefaces to suit
their personal needs. But the problem is 
not enough fonts, but not enough users who
know how to use those that are already
available. The manufacturers are not so much
responding to demand but creating it, to
produce a world of type-fanciers and type-%
addicts who will need more and more fonts to
satisfy their cravings!

James Mosley (St Bride Printing Library)
took us on what he called 'a brief canter
through history', tracing the development of
the Bodoni typeface and the historical
influences that have a bearing on modern text
design, including the thick\slash thin stresses that
arose from using reeds, quills and brushes,
and the pure geometry of styles on wax.
Bodoni is characterised by very pronounced
thicks and thins, which required exceptional
press work to reproduce well in letterpress;
offset litho helped to refine them even further.

Mary Dyson (Reading University) updated us
on the {\sc didot} (Digitising and Designing for
Type) project. This multinational European
project has been going for just over a year and
has another two to run. Its main activity for
the next two years is to design, implement and
evaluate a curriculum for digital typography. 
It will also organise
seminars, workshops and summer schools for
typographers\slash graphic artists and computer
specialists, trying to bring these two fields
together. The computer specialists tend to see
`digital typography' in terms of type design,
font acquisition, font manipulation and
rendering, whereas the typographers tend to
be interested in the broader context of letter
spacing, word spacing, leading, line length,
type area, page margins. Bringing them
together allows useful exploration of such
issues as image processing, printing and
display technology, character recognition,
curve-fitting techniques, cultural and artistic
tradition, visual perception, {\sc cad}, and
knowledge-based systems. To date, {\sc didot}
seminars have been more successful in
attracting designers, but later meetings have
been better balanced.

Probably the most controversial presenation
was given by Lyn Woosey of Adobe. She
gamely introduced us to Multiple Mastering
(MM) which is an extension to Adobe's Type~1 
font format. Instead of using hints and
encryptions to cope with the problems of
scaling one master outline font, MM gives you
different masters for different sizes. This
doesn't mean you'll have to buy a master for
every conceivable point size because MM
allows interpolation between master designs.
That is, if you buy a 6\,pt master and a 12\,pt
master but you want 8\,pt, MM will be able to
produce this by `intelligent interpolation'. But
interpolation doesn't stop there -- you can
interpolate between roman and italic,
condensed and expanded, even serif and san-%
serif if the font is available in both varieties --
you name a set of typographic variables and
you can interpolate to your heart's content, at
least in principle. Now, it seems only fair to
point out that this horrified the audience
rather than gratified them. Remembering
Alison Black and Paul Stiff's strictures earlier
in the day, we had visions of font anarchy.
However, it looks likely that Adobe will not
give its customers a completely free hand.
Some practical examples of the uses of MM
were given, for example, fitting type to measure,
equalising columns of text translated into
various languages, simulating character
widths when there is a need to print from a
printer not loaded vith the right typeface.
However, the examples tended to be seen as
either solvable by other means, of limited
application, or trivial. The first multiple
masters should be available early 1992.

Following lunch, Peter Rosenfeld spoke about
Font Technology and Intelligent Font Scaling.
Peter works for URW, a German company
who produce type tools such as Ikarus
(designing typefaces), Linus (autotracing) and
Nimbus (intelligent font scaling). They
digitise about 200 new typefaces a year. Most
of this is hand-digitised (using a digitising
tablet) rather than scanned, and most designs
are created manually rather than designed on
screen. (Screens are not accurate enough, and
a design takes longer, especially if corrections
are required.)

The day ended with Glenn Jones giving a
fascinating account of the effect of desktop
publishing on his
company (GBM), an advertising typesetting
house in Manchester. This used to be a
Berthold house, and resisted moving to
Macintoshes initially because of the lower
quality. However, Macintoshes allowed access
to a much wider type library and the ability to
create one's own type, which is very important
in this market. Berthold were dragging their
feet, so the plunge to Macs was made. Two
years ago, there were ten advertising
typesetters in Manchester, all Berthold; now
there are two, both using Macs. Their work
has diversified, so that in addition to
typesetting, they now also offer bureau work
and font digitisation. They are very pleased to
find that, as the requirement for trade
typesetting has declined (with the recession
hitting advertising badly, and many companies
now producing their own adverts), they have
found a future that builds upon their previous
experience.

The formal part of the meeting ended with a
lively question-and-answer session, following
which all attendees were kindly invited by
James Mosley to take a look around the
Printing Library -- a wonderful opportuniy to
see some mediaeval digitisation, interpolated
on the fly!\author{Cliff Morgan}

\bar\title{Update on Didot}
With the {\sc didot} (Digitising and Designing of
Type) project now in its second year, it must
be time to look at some of the past
activities.

We should  remind ourselves of the
aims of this three year, {\sc comett ii} project.
These are to:
\bitem design, implement and evaluate a
curriculum for digital typography,
\bitem organise seminars\slash workshops for
typographers\slash graphic artists and
computer specialists;
\bitem publish and distribute information.

The main activities to date have been:
 1990,18th--19th September,  Introduction to
\PS, held in Lausanne; 23 October,
Presentation of {\sc didot} project, also in
Lausanne; 4 December, Fonts, in Paris.
1991: 28th February--1st March, Type design:
radition and innovation, held in Reading;
23rd--28th September, First European Summer
School in Digital Typography, in Lausanne,
yet again.

In more detail, the  1991 activities started off
with a seminar\slash workshop at Reading University.
We worked together with our partners at
Basel, Sch\"ule f\"ur Gestaltung, and with the UK
Associate of URW to put on this
seminar\slash workshop. The main purpose of this
workshop was to explore ways of introducing
people to some of the issues surrounding
letterform design.

Workshop activities ranged from exercises in
producing letterforms by making marks on
paper, to demonstrations of type production
methods. The traditional methods of punch
cutting, matrix making and type casting were
contrasted with computer-based methods,
IkarusM.

Seminars dealt with the concept of a
workshop, in conjunction with workshop
activities. There were also lectures which gave
us an insight into the major influences on the
development of the letterform, and a view of
what digital techniques have done to the
relationship between designer, production
method and final result.

We were hoping to meet designers, educators,
and computer scientists, but the 30
participants were mostly from backgrounds of
type design or production, and education.
Despite this bias, the meeting did bring
together an unlikely mix of people, and an
unusual juxtaposition of old and new
technologies. The problem with mixing
people in this way is that we don't know how
to talk to each other. The language of the
seminars was not the normal language of
computer scientists. But, we hope that {\sc didot}
and more of these meetings will break down
these barriers.

The next activity, the Lausanne Summer School was a larger
scale affair, lasting a week, with about fifty
participants. Activities spanned technical
talks, talks combined with workshops,
computer-aided type design workshops, and
lectures on relaed issues. If we chose to be
technical in the mornings, we learned about
font metrics, rasterisation grid fitting
techniques, splines, autohinting, font
descriptions, autotracing, and type forms for
grey scale. If we preferred getting our hands
on mice and keyboards, we were given
opportunities with workshops on
Fontographer, {\sc Typo}, Ikarus, the design of
grey level fonts, or grappling with complexity
in font design.

Because of the choice provided in the
programme, a sense of frustration did develop
amongst those people who wished to do all
things. But a very positive aspect of the week
was the flexible organisation. In response to
demand, we were offered mini workshops to
enable us to sample virtually all the systems.
The only difficulty remaining was to decide
whether to wear a technical hat or a design
hat. Don't we wear the one that we know fits
us well, so that we don't have to struggle in the
wind? Yes, there we were in our niches,
confirming the need for the {\sc didot} project.


If you would like to be added to the database
of those interested in the project, you can
contact Jacques Andr\'e directly (project
coordinator) or I will pass on your details:
Jacques Andr\'e (email: {\tt jandre@irisa.fr}).
\author{Mary Dyson}



\endinput