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Dr Peter Karow Award goes to Thomas Milo
v1.2 (12 December 2009) / v1.0 (26 October 2009)
The second Dr Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography goes to Thomas Milo of DecoType and has been presented in November at the
Type[&]Design 2009 conference in The Hague.
Frank Blokland watching Dr Peter Karow presenting the award to Thomas Milo. (More photographs can be found on
Typophile.)
The second Dr Peter Karow Award
Citing the
complete announcement:
The second Dr Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography has been awarded to Thomas Milo for the development of the ACE layout engine (the heart of the Tasmeem plugin for InDesign ME) for Arabic text setting.
The Dr Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography is presented once per five years to a person who makes an exceptional and innovative contribution to the development of digital type and typography related technology. The first Dr Peter Karow Award was presented to Dr Peter Karow himself at the third DTL FontMaster Conference at Castle Maurick in 2003. So, in this case it took actually an extra year before the jury (Dr Peter Karow, Dr Jürgen Willrodt, Peter Rosenfeld and Frank E Blokland [chairman]) came to an unanimous decision for the second award.
Thomas Milo and his company DecoType developed with ACE, which is an acronym for 'Arabic Calligraphic Engine', new advanced technology for Arabic text setting, which needs a far more sophisticated approach than for instance the Latin script, based on a thorough analysis of the Arabic script. Not only served Milo's typographic research as the fundament for the ACE technology, clearly it also formed a basis for the development of the OpenType format, although this is a less known and acknowledged fact.
Thomas Milo's importance for the development of digital type and typography is evident and in line with the position of Dr Peter Karow in the field. As one consultant of the award jury stated: 'Dr Karow made type digital in a way we know today (description of shapes as outlines, rasterization, hinting, greyscaling, plus page-layout improvements). Thomas Milo added the "smartness" needed for scripts that ask for a more sophisticated behavior than Latin'.
On the 18th of November Dr Peter Karow shall personally present the award to Thomas Milo at the
Type[&]Design 2009 conference in The Hague.
The jury of the Dr Peter Karow Award congratulates Thomas Milo with his impressive achievements!
There could not have been a better candidate for this award. Both Peter Karow and Thomas Milo have done original and fundamental work. Original in that what they created, digital type and typography as well as smart font and layout technology, did not exist as such before. And fundamental in that this work has been draw on by others. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!
The DTL Type[&]Design 2009 conference
The conference was a most delightful event – informative, entertaining, with a good lunch in the impressive dining hall of the Steigenberger Kurhaus, and the opportunity to see and talk to friends and collegues.
Further reading
Audio and video recordings of all Type[&]Design 2009 presentations are hosted at
River Valley TV. Highly recommended.
Presentation PDFs can be downloaded from the
DTL website.
Coverage by
De Levante.
For links related to Thomas Milo, DecoType, ACE and Tasmeem, please see an earlier note's
further reading section.
All texts, unless noted otherwise:
Copyright © Karsten Luecke
All rights reserved.
All product and company names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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