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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