Elseware

Seattle company founded 1990 by ex-Aldus employees Ben Bauermeister and Clyde McQueen to develop the PANOSE font matching technology. Most professional TrueType fonts built for Windows contain these 10 values, and applications can use them to find the closest match to a given font that is not installed on a user’s system. The technology showed amazing potential when extended to PANOSE 2.0 (also known as Infinifont), where enough parameters were stored for each font to recreate them to be practically indistinguishable from their original, in around only 2Kb of data. There was great potential for using this representation for powerful parametric adjustments to type designs. In-house designer Karl Leuthold created some original typefaces using the PANOSE 2 design tools. In December 1995 the company was snapped up by Hewlett-Packard for the comparatively unexciting purpose of font compression.