[1] Zapf was born in Nuremberg[2] during turbulent times marked by the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in Munich and Berlin, the end of World War I, the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the establishment of Bavaria as a free state by Kurt Eisner.

[3] Famine later struck Germany, and Zapf's mother was grateful to send him to school in 1925, where he received daily meals in a program organized by Herbert Hoover.

Even at this early age, Zapf was already getting involved with type, inventing cipher alphabets to exchange secret messages with his brother.

However, his father had become unemployed and was in trouble with the newly established Third Reich, having been involved with trade unions,[3] and was sent to the Dachau concentration camp for a short time.

Through print historian Gustav Mori, Zapf came into contact with the type foundries D. Stempel, AG, and Linotype GmbH of Frankfurt.

As a consequence of hard labor, he developed heart trouble in a few weeks and was given a desk job, writing camp records and sports certificates in Fraktur.

In the cartography unit at Bordeaux, Zapf drew maps of Spain, especially the railway system, which could have been used to transport artillery had Francisco Franco not used narrow-gauge tracks to repair bridges after the Spanish Civil War.

His eyesight was so good that he could write letters 1 millimeter in height without using a magnifying glass, and this skill probably prevented him from being commissioned back into the army.

They did not ask for qualifications, certificates, or references, but instead only required him to show them his sketchbooks from the war and a calligraphic piece he did in 1944 of Hans von Weber's "Junggesellentext".

From 1948 to 1950, Zapf taught calligraphy at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach, giving lettering lessons twice a week to two classes of graphics students.

Melior suggests the work of the great German neoclassical printer Justus Erich Walbaum but also is based on the mathematical "super-ellipse".

[9] Dan Margulis commented on his death that "you would have to say that his historical standing will be based on the first ten years of his professional career.

"[10][11] Zapf's later releases for Linotype in the 1990s and 2000s, often created in collaboration with Akira Kobayashi, were radical reformations of his previous work, often removing compromises that had been necessary in the manufacture of metal type.

The best-known example may be Monotype's Book Antiqua, which was included in Microsoft Office and is often considered an imitation of Palatino.

His largest calligraphic project was the "Preamble to the United Nations Charter", written in four languages, commissioned by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York in 1960,[12] for which he received $1000.

But his ideas about calligraphy indirectly influenced the look of the mid-20th century as he served as a consultant to Hallmark Cards throughout the 1960s and 70s, helping them to develop a style manual for their lettering artists.

Because he had no success in Germany, Zapf went to the United States, where he lectured about computerized typesetting, and was invited to speak at Harvard University in 1964.

In 1976, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) offered Zapf a professorship in typographic computer programming, the first of its kind in the world.

In 1977, Zapf and his friends Aaron Burns and Herb Lubalin founded Design Processing International, Inc., in New York and developed typographical computer software.

Instead, he used his experience to begin the development of a typesetting program, the "Hz-program", building on the hyphenation and justification system in TeX.

During financial problems and bankruptcy of URW++ in the mid-1990s, Adobe Systems acquired the Hz patent(s) and later made some use of the concepts in their InDesign program.

After Siegel finished his studies at Stanford and was interested in entering the field of typography, he told Zapf his idea of making a typeface with a large number of glyph variations and wanted to start with an example of Zapf's calligraphy, which had been reproduced in a publication of the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago.

Such a pleasing result could only be achieved using modern digital technology, and so Zapf and Siegel began work on the complicated software necessary.

Siegel abandoned the project and started a new life, working on bringing color to Macintosh computers and later becoming an Internet design expert.