We present the early development stages of ETAP, a platform for experimenting with typesetting algorithms. The purpose of this platform is twofold: while its primary objective is to provide building blocks for quickly and easily designing and testing new algorithms (or variations on existing ones), it can also be used as an interactive, real time demonstrator for many features of digital typography, such as kerning, hyphenation, or ligaturing.

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.

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.