URW (company)

URW Type Foundry GmbH is a typeface foundry based in Hamburg Germany. It is the successor of Unternehmensberatung Rubow Weber (URW; meaning Rubow Weber Consulting) which was founded in 1972. The URW++ has become a leading developer of digital font technology, designing open source fonts as well as custom typefaces for businesses.

URW was involved in a 1995 lawsuit with Monotype Corporation for cloning its fonts and naming them with a name starting with the same three letters. As typeface shapes themselves cannot be copyrighted in the United States, the lawsuit centered on trademark infringement. A US court decided that Monotype's trademarks were "fanciful" and did not have descriptive value of the actual products. However it also decided that URW was confusing the public deliberately because "the purloining of the first part of a well-known trademark and the appending of it to a worthless suffix is a method of trademark poaching long condemned by the courts." The court issued an injunction preventing URW from using its chosen names.

Some of the fonts created by URW include:

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