The journey of a word: how text ends up on a page
Presented by
Simon Cozens
Thursday
2:15 p.m.–3 p.m.
Target audience:
Developer
Abstract
What really happens when you type characters into a word processor, typesetter or desktop publishing system, and press print? For the past few years I've been writing software which lays out characters into documents. It's had to deal with OpenType fonts, Unicode texts and PDF documents, and each of these have turned out to be really cool pieces of technology. We'll be breaking apart fonts to see what's inside, opening up PDF files in a text editor, and following the path of a word as it makes its way from your keyboard to the printed page.
Presented by
Simon Cozens
Simon is a former sysadmin, a former author, a former missionary, and is now a college lecturer. He tries to be a former open source coder but has never managed to give up it. Once known for writing Perl, he now spends more time hacking in Ruby, JavaScript, and Lua. He also maintains the SILE typesetting engine and spends a lot of time messing about with fonts.