Typography (putting mostly textual content into shape) is an art because we are ultimately trying to create beautiful documents. Typography is also a craftsmanship because for a large part, beauty is in the eye of the reader, so experimentation is of paramount importance. Finally, typography is a science because most of the concrete problems that we need to solve are both chaotic in nature, and of exponential complexity.

In this talk, I will travel through the history of typography (past, present, and future), raising the audience’s awareness of its inner art, science, and craftsmanship. I will also try to emphasize on the importance of conscientious typography. In a world obsessed with communication, the beauty of a document is not a purely esthetic matter. Because beautiful texts are more pleasant to read, they are also easier to understand.

Didier Verna has a Ph.D. and an habilitation in Computer Science, and is currently working as a professor for EPITA, a private Computer Science university located in Paris. He gives or has given lectures on Operating Systems, Computer Graphics, Object-Oriented, Functional Programming and Typesetting. His main research interests are multi-paradigm approaches to genericity and performance, document engineering and typesetting.

Didier Verna is the president of the European Lisp Symposium steering committee and serves or has served as a program committee member in various conferences (International Lisp Conference, European Lisp Symposium, Dynamic Languages Symposium, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Onward!, Context-Oriented Programming workshop etc. ).

Didier Verna is also quite involved in free software: he was one of the core maintainers of XEmacs for more than 15 years, a contributor to Gnus and BBDB, and an occasional contributor to other Free Software projects (the GNU Autotools most notably; he was one of the technical reviewers for the “Goat Book”). He is the author of several LaTeX packages and Common Lisp libraries.

All of this is in fact half-true: two days a week, Didier Verna drops his scientific hat and wears the semi-professional Jazz musician one instead (he has released 3 albums with his quartet). He also is a certified Aikido teacher, and gives coaching sessions on the theme “Aikido and Conflict Management” for large companies.