Jürg Lehni – Typeface As Progamme - Harald Peter Ström

creative sector, this also led to a change in the nature of the work being done, often
to the disapproval of the previous specialists in the field. While type design in the
19th century was a craft accessible to very few selected typographers who together
with punch cutters worked on designs for one of the companies producing
typesetting equipment, it is now a discipline that anyone who has access to a
computer and a license for a type design software can engage in.
These are generally known aspects of this revolution that have been looked at
closely many times before. But the role of software is rarely analyzed beyond this
point. It appears that the general function of the computer is still accepted simply
as a simulation machine, and the question what software could or should provide in
any given field is rarely raised. Instead, the status quo is often accepted as a given,
a language we use in our daily work and that we have stopped questioning, since it
is so ubiquitous that is it almost invisible.
Furthermore, in the historic discourse of digital typefaces, questions regarding the
definition and nature of digital typefaces are hardly risen and the status quo is
rarely questioned beyond the boundaries of the industrial standards.
Fonts, Tools and Software
Traditionally, a font was a complete set of metal characters of a particular typeface
in a given size and style. Etymologically, the word goes back to the French word
fonte and the verb fondre, meaning to melt or to cast, referencing the way fonts
were produced by type foundries. Fonts were one of the ingredients needed in the
printing process in order to be able to print text, and they were bought in full sets
from the foundries. A set included more copies of some letters than others,
depending on the statistical occurrence of each letter in any given language. The
structure of the letter cases that hold the letters represented this distribution.
A font was not a full, independent tool in itself, but rather a part of a tool based
process, which, without it could not take place. Given its physical nature at that
time, it is imaginable that fonts were perceived as tools in themselves. At the same