History
Originally invented by URW employee Dr Peter Karow, Ikarus (German spelling of the mythical figure Icarus) got its name from the frequency with which it crashed in the early days of its development. It was designed to run on minicomputers such as DEC VAX and later adapted to microcomputers as they became increasingly powerful. In 1975, IKARUS was introduced at ATypI in Warsaw.
By the 1980s a huge library of typefaces and logos existed as photographic film and needed to be input into computers for the latest generation of printing and sign-making devices. Unfortunately, normal scanning gives a rasterized shape at the resolution of the scanning device which leads to degradation of quality when scaling up and down. This is a particular concern in the sign making industry where individual letters may be metres across, many times the size of the original artwork. Ikarus enables a human operator to input the features of a complex shape with curves, corners and straight lines (e.g. a letter of the alphabet) to a computer which stores it as a mathematical representation, for all intents and purposes independent of the size of the original artwork and of the final output. A version of Ikarus tailored for signmaking applications was released by URW as "Signus".
The advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s using Apple Macintosh computers coupled with laser printers led to a shift away from a small number of specialized print bureaux acquiring relatively expensive fonts to a growing market for cheap mass produced fonts. The drawback of Ikarus for catering for this new market was that, while extremely accurate, it was very labour intensive.
After Adobe Systems started licensing BuildFont, its technology for converting existing digital typeface data into PostScript font format, Ikarus gradually lost its leading position. Ikarus is being further developed by URW++ and DTL, Dutch Type Library, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Ikarus (typography Software)
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