On saturday, april 26th, a new edition of DiaTipo took place at ESPM school, in São Paulo.

DiaTipo is a meeting created in 2007 to gather people interested in type. Last edition saw a shift to a new theme-oriented format. “DiaTipo OpenType” had 16 attendees.

Fernando Caro started out talking about his graduation project, a typeface called Arauto. Fernando highlighted advantages of the OpenType format (facilitate the layout, simulate handwriting) and explained some command lines used in Arauto, such as contextual character replacement. Other attendees asked questions and talked about how they work. At the end, Fernando distributed a printed sheet newspaper test presentation of Arauto typeface.

Next, Tony de Marco spoke about particularities of the Samba typeface project, awarded in 2003 on a Linotype contest. There was talk about the increase of brazilians trading fonts on sites such as MyFonts and popularization of FontLab. Tony also presented printed sheets of some of his font projects to illustrate spacing and kerning steps.

Eduardo Omine made a more technical presentation. He talked about tools to aid the production of types (such as AFDKO - Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType), its advantages and disadvantages.

“DiaTipo OpenType” was a warm-up for an OpenType workshop that shall take place in June, as part of Tipos Latinos exhibit in São Paulo.

› Photos of “DiaTipo OpenType” at Flickr
› Fernando Caro’s graduation project about Arauto typeface (PDF)

Collective analysis of ongoing type projects was the theme suggested for DiaTipo’s next edition.

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