Individual scholars, scholarly associations and academic publishers regularly deal with texts whose needs, in terms of character set, complex layout and typographic refinement, exceed those of everyday font use and, hence, of most fonts. John Hudson examines some of these needs and the solutions provided by specialised and custom typefaces, using three projects as examples: SBL Hebrew (for the Society of Biblical Literature), Cambria Math (for Microsoft), and the new Brill family of types (for Royal Brill). The Brill project, which is in progress, illustrates the impact of both specialist user needs and a 325 year publishing tradition on design decisions, as well as the latest technical solutions to typesetting complex and unusual texts.
John Hudson is a type designer and co-founder of Tiro Typeworks. Since 1997, he has specialised in the design and development of custom fonts for multilingual computing and publishing. Tiro Typework’s clients include Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Linotype, as well as many smaller companies, academic associations and minority language communities. In addition to his type design activities, John writes and lectures on font technology issues.
