Re: Welcome, and introductions

Dear members of the WebFonts WG,

I am Adam Twardoch and I have been nominated to the WG by Bistream as a
W3C Member organization. I work as typographic consultant for MyFonts, a
division of Bitstream. In addition, I also work as product and marketing
manager for Fontlab Ltd., and occasionally as typographic and font
technology consultant for other companies. I mostly deal with font
technology issues, software tools and linguistic aspects of typography.
Unicode and OpenType are among my main areas of interest, and I've been
following and -- to some extent -- participating in the development of
webfont formats in the past few years.

I've been part in some standardization efforts in the past, though not
in any formal way.

In 2001-2002, I participated in the development of an "XMLFont" format,
which was an aim to represent SFNT (OpenType, TrueType) data in XML, in
an informal ad-hoc group together with representatives from Adobe,
Apple, Microsoft and Tiro Typeworks. Apple incorporated the format into
their Apple ftx Font Tools suite, and Microsoft incorporated aspects of
it into the Microsoft Font Validator tool. Just van Rossum's
implementation in FontTools/TTX has became a de facto standard for this
kind of representation, and I've contributed bits of code into that tool
as well.

I've done some work as an invited expert in the ISO/IEC 14496-22:2009
standardization process, particularly in the field of OpenType Layout.
This work is still ongoing, and I've been participating in the
discussions on the ISO 14496 and on the OpenType discussion lists. At
W3C, I've contributed some initial impulse and further (minor) input to
the editor's draft of the CSS3 Fonts spec which adds CSS properties that
address OpenType Layout features. I've produced a number of technical
papers for Fontlab Ltd., which have been or are being incorporated into
the users' manuals of FontLab applications. In addition, I've been
active in the opensource type community (TeX, XeTeX, FreeType, HarfBuzz,
FontTools/TTX). Through my work as the Board member of ATypI (from 2000
to 2006 and from 2009), I have acquired some familiarity with the nature
of "committee work".

On behalf of Fontlab Ltd., I've spoken at numerous design and type
conferences. In addition, for the last few years I've been teaching type
design and font technology at colleges and universities in Europe
(Poland, Germany, Russia, UK) and, occasionally, in other parts of the
world.

Looking at the list of members, I'm glad to realize that I personally
know most people on this WG, so I'm the more happy to participate. I
have no immediate plan or agenda here, but am keen to take part in all
of the WG's proceedings and activities, and learn other members' opinions.

I am located in Berlin, GMT+1.

Best,
Adam

Received on Friday, 9 April 2010 16:29:12 UTC