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. During his time at
Apple, he was responsible for
AAT, where he designed (for example) the
OpenType table, named after the type designer
Hermann Zapf. In the 1990s, Dave Opstad worked with
Tom Rickner and others to develop
TrueType GX. 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). 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 compatible surrogate 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" . == References ==