Peter Karow

Peter Karow (born November 11, 1940 in Stargard, Pomerania) is a German entrepreneur, inventor and software developer. He holds several patents in the field of desktop publishing and is known for his work on computer fonts. He contributed with several books and patents to the development of operating systems for computers. He is recognized as the inventor of outline computer fonts.

After graduating from high school in 1960 in Schöningen near Braunschweig, he enrolled at the University of Hamburg to study physics. He married in 1969 and has two children. After receiving his PhD in 1971, he co-founded the company URW Software & Type GmbH in Hamburg. In 1975, his Ikarus (typography software) was introduced to members of Association Typographique Internationale in Warsaw. Afterwards, Ikarus was used all over the world for the digitization of fonts. Between 1975 and 1995, URW digitized a large amount of fonts for companies such as IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Adobe, Linotype, Monotype, Rudolf Hell and numerous Japanese companies.

Printouts of single characters in a height of approximately 10 cm were digitized on a digitizer tablet of Aristo along their outlines, marking various points of support (beginning, corner, tangent and curve) with an accuracy of 1/100 mm. This invention together with a newly developed structure for storing and encoding single characters inside a font made characters, but also any other graphical signs freely scalable for the computer and available for other mathematical operations.

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