Among tech companies Opstad has worked for are Xerox, and Apple; he retired from the industry in 2021, leaving Monotype after more than 16 years.[7]
During his time at Apple, he was responsible for AAT, where he designed (for example) the OpenTypeZapf[8] table, named after the type designer Hermann Zapf. In the 1990s, Dave Opstad worked with Tom Rickner and others to develop TrueType GX.[9][10] At that time software producers like Microsoft or Adobe 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).[11][12]
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 compatiblesurrogate pairs), 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 and operating systems without either mojibake or "tofu" ⟨□; �⟩.[1]
References
^ abBecker, Joseph D. (10 September 1988). "Unicode 88"(PDF). Unicode Consortium (1998 ed.). Archived(PDF) from the original on 25 November 2016. Retrieved 25 October 2016. Unicode arose as the result of eight years of working experience with XCCS. Its fundamental differences from XCCS were proposed by Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad (pure 16-bit codes), and by Lee Collins (ideographic character unification). Unicode retains the many features of XCCS whose utility have been proved over the years in an international line of communication multilingual system products.
^"This Is Your Text on QuickDraw GX"(PDF). Macworld. December 1994. p. 25. I got the impression that developers like Aldus, Adobe, and Quark are reluctant to implement portions of QuickDrawGX because there is no equivalent technology for Windows.
