Editing Ikarus (typography software) (section)

==History==
Originally invented by URW employee Dr [[Peter Karow]], Ikarus (German spelling of the mythical figure [[Icarus (mythology)|Icarus]]) got its name from the frequency with which it crashed in the early days of its development. It was designed to run on [[minicomputer]]s such as [[DEC VAX]] and later adapted to [[microcomputer]]s as they became increasingly powerful. In 1975, IKARUS was introduced at [[ATypI]] in [[Warsaw]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.urwpp.de/english/divers/ueberurw_cont.html|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081208141852/http://www.urwpp.de/english/divers/ueberurw_cont.html|url-status=dead|title=About URW++|archivedate=December 8, 2008}}</ref>

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 [[Image scanning|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 printer]]s 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]].