Designing with TeX: episode IV

Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi lingual publication for Constant. We returned a little wiser about ConTeXt and the things it can do well, and cannot (yet) do. We also brought back a few working installations, a beautiful solution for image linking, the understanding that CMYK is easy, some answers to the problem of line-height switching plus a basic hack for multiple language streams. This all against the usual tarif.

So, in case you were wondering what happened to our project to design with TeX: we are still working on it!

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier’s appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre’s mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on his approach.

Georges Charlier is the passionate owner of pre-press, printing and publishing house Salto. He lives and works in Ulbeek, Limburg (B) where he restores a former brewery, and transforms it into a platform for the production and conception of extraordinary publications.

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Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN – Das Ist Norm – Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to define on what criteria and with which tool to work (name dropping : stroke parts – stroke fonts in FontForge – svg fonts in Inkscape – Metafont – …). So we browse through some of the pictures we brought back from the DIN archive.

From the different versions we have seen in the archives, it seems that the main DIN letters models are based on solo strokes drawn on a grid at small size. It was the regular usage for most of the texts in the engineering environment. The thickness of the tool used (pencil, drawing pen, ball nose mill) defined the boldness of the strokes and the round or less round shape of their extremities, like flesh on bones.
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