Thomas Milo
DecoType
Thomas Milo is the director of DecoType
Unlike any other player in this field, DecoType develops font technology that takes into the equation the Islamic calligraphic tradition and the requirements for both modern and classical Arabic orthography. In addition to that, DecoType contributes conventional Arabic fonts to the Apple MacOSX and Classic OS, as well as Microsoft Office and Adobe PageMaker, PhotoShop and InDesign.
The fundamental difference between Latin script and Arabic script makes computerizing Arabic script more than a matter of font design. DecoType has been working on Arabic script technology since 1982.
In 1985 DecoType invented the concept of Dynamic Font (Smart Font, Intelligent Font) which was eventually licensed by Microsoft in the form of a Ruq'ah and a Naskh OLE-server (these projects gave Microsoft Typography the proof of concept for the emerging OpenType technology and the model for their Arabic projects).
A typical example of the impact of many major and minor inventions of DecoType in the field of Arabic script handling is the "Allah shortcut" which was originally researched and tested for the unvowelled DecoType Ruq' ah project (1986) and consequently borrowed by Microsoft to become a de facto standard (although the concept is now outdated by the Unicode Standard and DecoType developed a more accurate concept to deal with this).
He contributed the chapter on Arabic to Language Culture Type ("a wide-angle snapshot of global typeface development at the start of the 21st century").