Re: Welcome, and introductions

Hullo. I am John Hudson, and I usually describe myself as a type 
designer and font developer. Most of the work I do involves making 
custom fonts for publishers, software companies, government agencies, 
specific language communities, etc., rather than fonts for retail 
licensing. For most of the past fifteen years, I've been involved in 
making fonts for multilingual computing and publishing, and have 
designed and built fonts -- either alone or in collaboration -- for 
Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Ogham, 
Thai, and other scripts. One of my interests in the development of a 
standard for web served typography -- via CSS font properties and a 
webfont format --, is in watching out for instances in which erroneous 
assumptions might be made based on the typography of a single writing 
system such as the Latin script. This history of font technology is 
replete with such assumptions and resulting problems for and limitations 
imposed on other scripts.

This is my first formal involvement with the W3C. I have some previous 
standards experience as an invited expert with Unicode and as a member 
of CAC/JTC1/SC2, the Canadian national standards body for coded 
character sets. Over the years, I have also contributed various ideas to 
the improvement (I hope) of the OpenType font format specification.

Officially, I represent only myself, but will try to report, as 
accurately as I understand them, the views/hopes/fears of my 
professional type design colleagues as and when they are relevant to 
discussions.

I am located on an island in the recently renamed Salish Sea, which puts 
me in the Pacific time zone (GMT-8). This usually means that 
international conference calls are scheduled at early hours when 
gentlemen wouldn't normally think of using the telephone.


JH

Received on Monday, 12 April 2010 05:25:57 UTC