Amélie Bonet from Dalton Maag conducts type workshop with Leaf Design

Event, March 2011

Amélie Bonet nicely segued from Hudson’s second case study into The Monotype designer and font engineer Amélie Bonet spoke about “Indic Engineering: key issues in Indic type production and design” with the Leaf team.

The Devanagari script specialist reminded the audience of the discrepancy between the number of users (approximately half a billion Devanagari readers greatly outnumber, for example, the approximately 13 million readers of the Greek alphabet) and the

number of available typefaces (the users of the Greek alphabet have many more typographic options). She gave a historical overview of Devanagari typesetting and explained how technical restrictions gave rise to alterations in Devanagari letterforms, and even affected the lettering tradition. Although modern feature-rich OpenType fonts can create the correct glyph shapes and composing conjuncts, legacy problems with typesetting give rise to mistakes in contemporary designs based on historic typefaces. Devanagari fonts still suffer from problems with adoption and rendering, and have issues with shaping engines. This forces font developers to devise workarounds for faultily composed glyphs.

https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/typo-labs-2017-report-part-two-of-two