Just van Rossum is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 typeface designer and computer programmer.

Typeface design

Just van Rossum’s typefaces combination of programming and letterform design has resulted in several developments in typeface design. His typeface FF Beowolf used a random feature of the PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 language to generate randomly different letter forms each time when printed. FF Beowolf laid the foundation for the FontFont

FSI FontShop International

FSI FontShop International is an international manufacturer of digital typefaces , based in Berlin and one of the large type foundries that exist today.All the typefaces are published as part of the FontFont library...

 library. Van Rossum’s FF Justlefthand was (as part of the FF Hands package) the first digital handwriting font ever, which caused in a global geographic extension of the type family. He also worked with Erik Spiekermann

Erik Spiekermann

Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer and designer. He is a professor at the University of the Arts Bremen....

 in developing the ITC Officina typeface, containing a sans and slab serif version.

List of faces designed by van Rossum

• FF Advert
• FF Beowolf (with Erik van Blokland)
• LTR Bodoni (with Erik van Blokland)
• FF Brokenscript
• FF Double Digits (with Manfred Klein)
• F Flixel
• FF Instant Types (incl. FF Confidential, FF Dynamoe, FF Flightcase, FF Karton, FF Stamp Gothic)
• FF Justlefthand (as part of FF Hands)
• ITC Officina (with Erik Spiekermann)
• FB Phaistos (with David Berlow)
• FF Schulbuch
• FF Schulschrift
• FF Trixie
  Trixie (typeface)
  Trixie is a distressed monospaced serif typeface created by Erik Van Blokland in 1991 using the inspiration of an old, worn typewriter. Its "X" character is famously used in the title of The X-Files. The font is not in the public domain, and was used by the X-Files producers without seeking...
  
   (with Erik van Blokland)
• F What You Think (with Erik van Blokland)

Programming achievements

Notable achievements of Just van Rossum include:

• the IDE
  Integrated development environment
  An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...
  
   for MacPython, included in the standard Python distribution
• being the designer of the "Python Powered" logo font used on Python websites around the Internet
• creating the FontTools open source Python library for manipulating fonts
• creating the TTX open source tool (based on FontTools) for converting OpenType and TrueType fonts from their native formats to XML, and back

Personal life

Just van Rossum is the brother of Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...

, creator of the Python computer programming language.

External links

• LettError, Just van Rossum’s typography company
• Overview of Just van Rossum’s typefaces,
• Just’s page at python.net
• Python Powered logo page