David G. Opstad (born ) is a retired American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

specializing during his career in computer typography and

information processing Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process that ''describes'' everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock (a change in posit ...

(focusing on character encodings), leading to several breakthroughs. Opstad was a contributor to Unicode 1.0, together with Joe Becker, Lee Collins, Huan-mei Liao, and Nelson Ng. Opstad spent much of his career in

private industry The private sector is the part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is owned by private groups, usually as a means of establishment for profit or non profit, rather than being owned by the government. Employment The ...

at Apple, where he contributed to its TrueType font specifications. His work on

TrueType GX QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw (QD) 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the classic Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was a resolution-independent object oriented retained mode system, making it much easier for ...

, although not much used or supported in its own time, formed the basis for OpenType Font Variations as they can be applied to TrueType outline fonts—all OpenType fonts with quadratic Bézier curves. Opstad is named on several US software patents.

Education

Opstad has a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese and a

Master of Library Science The Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS), also referred to as the Master of Library and Information Studies, is the master's degree that is required for most professional librarian positions in the United States. The MLIS is a relat ...

from University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Among tech companies Opstad has worked for are IBM, Xerox, and Apple; he retired from the industry in 2021, leaving Monotype after more than 16 years. During his time at Apple, he was responsible for

AAT AAT or Aat may refer to: Aviation * Asia Airfreight Terminal, Hong Kong International Airport * Altay Airport, Xinjiang, China * Location identifier for Alturas Municipal Airport, California, United States Biochemistry * Alpha 1-antitrypsin, ...

, where he designed (for example) the OpenType table, named after the type designer

Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Pa ...

. In the 1990s, Dave Opstad worked with Tom Rickner and others to develop

. At that time software producers like Microsoft or

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

did not implement the necessary support for this new technology, however, TrueType GX would later become the basis of modern variable fonts, (also known as OpenType Font Variations). Besides his work on font standards, Opstad's work on the earliest versions of Unicode—proposing the use of discrete 16-bit character codes (which was later increased, but retained via

backwards compatible Backward or Backwards is a relative direction. Backwards or Sdrawkcab (the word "backwards" with its letters reversed) may also refer to: * "Backwards" (''Red Dwarf''), episode of sci-fi TV sitcom ''Red Dwarf'' ** ''Backwards'' (novel), a nov ...

surrogate pairs UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as cod ...

), rather than the way that was then common and which he'd grown frustrated with, Xerox's Character Code Standard (XCCS)—led to easy exchange of messages between different

computer hardware Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the computer case, case, central processing unit (CPU), Random-access memory, random access memory (RAM), Computer monitor, monitor, Computer mouse, mouse, Computer keyboard, ...

and

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

without either mojibake or " tofu" .

Education

Career

References

Further reading