Home / ATypI Copenhagen 2001
Date Friday, September 21st 2001
Venue Falkoner Centret, Copenhagen, Denmark / Track B

DTL FontMaster, a set of utilities for the fontproduction

Frank E Blokland (Copenhagen 2001) Frank E Blokland

Type tools & type users …

DTL FontMaster is a set of modules, which can be acquired seperately.
The first module, DTL ContourMaster is a batch checker and improver of contours. It solves problems with open contours, double points, extreme points, etc. DTL BezierMaster is a bezier editor and makes it possible to import the files from the improver and check the status and, if necessary, makes it possible to make more changes. The third module, DTL Interpolate­Master, optimizes contours for interpolation and does the interpolation. The fourth mod­ule is DTL DataMaster, which makes it possi­ble to generate fonts in several formats for different platforms from a central database.

Frank E Blokland (Copenhagen 2001)
Speaker

Frank E Blokland

Frank E Blokland (Leiden 1959) studied Graphic and Typographic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague from 1978 until 1982. As a student, he founded the working group Letters), from which have come many now well known Dutch type designers. During the eight­ies, Blokland designed the letterings of a num­ber of monuments, including the Homo­monument at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.
Blokland wrote the coursebook for the Teleac course Calligraphy, the art of writing in 1990. 16,000 copies of this book went over the counter. Further, since the eighties he has written some 150 articles on type design and production for various graphic and design magazines, like Compres, Pers, PrintBuyer, Hamburger Satzpiegel and Page.
After years of preparation, in 1990 Frank E Blokland founded the Dutch Type Library, the first and now larget producer and publisher of digital typefaces in the Netherlands. For the production of fats, the Dutch Type Library uses DTL FontMaster, a set utilities originally developed for their own use at DTL Germany, to be released to the market in autumn 2001. Blokland has designed typefaces like DTL Documenta, DTL Documenta Sans, DTL Haarlemmer ( on the basis of drawings by Jan van Krimpen), DTL Haarlemmer Sans and DTL Romulus (also on the basis of drawings by Jan van Krimpen).
Since 1987 Blokland has been a lecturer at the Royal Academy in The Hague, where he teaches drawing type, and at the Plantin Society in Antwerp, Belgium. Further he has lectured as a guest at the Technical University of Delft, the University of Reading and Lahti Polytechnic University.