I am currently attending Robothon 2009 at the KABK in The Hague. No, Robothon doesn’t involve any giant robots nor grown men wearing rubber dinosaur suits – it is a conference organised by the RoboFab creators which focuses on the type design and production workflow. It is fascinating to see how these brilliant minds critically assess the shortcomings of the currently available font production tools, and manage to come up with valuable, novel solutions for them. The auditorium is filled with the brightest minds in type design and type production, and many shining new hopes studying at Type & Media, Leipzig, and Reading.

Yesterday we’ve seen some very interesting things on the updated UFO2 format, testing, kerning, prepolating and superpolating (interpolation is so nineties ;) from Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, and now we kicked off with a lecture by Reading alumnus Ben Kiel about overflowing kerning tables, followed by Just van Rossum on TTX and FontTools. Although I have no hands-on experience in type design nor production whatsoever, I must say I grasp most of it, and it is an eye-opener. I will post a report when it is over.