URW is the successor of the company URW (Unternehmensberatung Rubow Weber — from the founders’ names), in Hamburg, Germany. Under the technical direction of Peter Karow, this company led the world in developing digital font technology.
Its IKARUS suite of font digitization tools and file format standards handles fonts as bitmaps, as greyscale (anti-aliased bitmaps), as vector outlines, and as curved outlines. If a typeface exists on paper, then IKARUS is still the choice of many professionals. The program uses the unfashionable puck as input method.