In addition to vector drawing tools, FontLab now includes two new modes for drawing and editing glyphs: VectorPaint lets you create simplified Illustrator brushstrokes that don’t have pressure sensitivity, and Sketch mode is where you edit a glyph’s outline. Unlike other font editors, FontLab does not irreparably convert TrueType splines into PostScript curves when opening a TrueType font. FontLab also converts from PostScript to TrueType and vice versa. Getting the Glyphs InįontLab allows you to draw glyphs using both PostScript-style Bézier curves and TrueType-style splines, so your glyphs print well in the font format you choose. Some buttons appear on multiple toolbars others that look almost identical have very different functions. Once you learn FontLab, you’ll be glad you did.But FontLab’s interface is plagued by confusing toolbars, whose organization makes it impossible to intuit their uses. It is necessary for excellence in letterspacing, kerning, OpenType features, and more. If you are serious at all about learning to design fonts, you will need the power of FontLab. Plus it can show character names in the font window.įontLab is for the professional font designer and others who need to create robust, commercial-quality fonts. It can automatically add any new glyphs used by an OpenType feature set, use multiple master fonts for building font families, work with up to 64,000 characters (for Asian fonts), right-to-left (Arabic and Hebrew) text support, programmable font transformation, encoding templates, editing CMap files, manual TrueType and Type 1 hinting, and test fonts with Font Auditor. It does really well at generating new glyphs for special encodings. It has a far superior interface for people who need to hand produce all the letterspacing and kerning in a font. It can do class-based kerning easily and well. You can control it with Python scripts, you can write OpenType features within it. Its interface is not nearly so intuitive as Fontographer, but it is much more powerful. FontLabįontLab is a professional font design program for people who went to school to learn font design, people working in the font industry, and designers producing fonts for sale. Fontographer does a marvelous job of auto spacing.įontographer is for digital graphic designers who need to make or edit fonts in the course of their work. Its hand letterspacing tools are really laborious and difficult to control.īut that is compensated for by the power of its Auto Space and Auto Kern controls. You cannot show the names of characters in the font window unless they are Unicode glyphs-and characters for oldstyle figures, small caps, small cap figures, denominators, and so on do not have Unicode names. Fontographer cannot write OpenType feature files. Adding the character slots for Eastern European, Cyrillic, or Hebrew characters would be a real pain, for example, without an existing sample font. After nearly a decade in FontLab, font design is fun again. It has been a real joy to experience that fun again. This is a superb drawing program for typographers who want to take the next step.įontographer is a wonderful drawing experience. Illustrator and InDesign experience also translates well. Because FreeHand was developed out of Fontographer, FreeHand experience is good. Fontographerįontographer is for people with a long history of drawing with Béziér curves and working in typography. It takes a while to learn, but it’s worth it. But the path editing interface of FontLab is simply better. I tried Fontographer for drawing and FontLab for the more technical portions. People like myself will probably be drawn to FontLab. Plus, I was really looking forward to relearning Fontographer, now in version 5.1. I was and am grateful for the opportunity. In 2011, Ted Harrison, president of FontLab, contacted me to see if I was interested in bundling Practical Font Design with his software and possibly writing a version of Practical Font Design for Fontographer. It was and is still surprisingly popular. I wrote about what I learned in a book called Practical Font Design now in the 3rd Edition for print Practical Font Design, Third Edition and Practical Font Design, Third Edition Plus for Kindle. I learned an entirely new way of drawing that was necessitated by FontLab’s tools. I learned how to carefully and professionally hand space fonts. I learned how to write OpenType features. Thomas Phinney, then of Adobe, told me I had no option but to go to FontLab. My old version of Fontographer would not run in Mac OSX very well. They were selling a little on Myfonts. When OpenType became viable with the release of InDesign I needed to find something else. Personally, I started in Fontographer in the early 1990s and gradually built a little sideline of designing fonts. We need to get this question out of the way before we get started.
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