But we’ve also been working on a more comprehensive upgrade. You’ve seen some of these improvements in the free updates that we have published since the premiere. We shipped the first public preview version in 2015, premiered the app in 2017, and we tirelessly kept making it better. Introducing FontLab 7: The pro font editor, evolved.įontLab 7 is a major upgrade to FontLab VI. It does not have this problem, but does bring compatibility with macOS 12. This is the same version as was available before 11 March. Unfortunately, we discovered a problem in this version: when you open some fonts, FontLab sets the fill of the glyphs transparent. On 11 March 2022, we published FontLab 7. ⏳ Starter 3‑months license: □ $ 89 (not $ 97). Serious font folks use them both, but Studio is too substantial an investment of time and money for casual users.FontLab 8 sale □ until 8 September 2023! If you can live without Studio’s advanced features-OpenType and native TrueType support, better metrics editing, superior Multiple Master support, and programmability-then you will probably be happier with Fontographer. Macworld’s buying adviceįontLab Studio 5.0.2 is the most capable font editor you can buy today, but it is hard to learn. But Studio 5’s usability is now good enough for me to be comfortable doing most of my font work with it. I did not like the interface of Studio 5’s predecessors: FontLab 3 and 4. If an append goes wrong you may not realize that something bad has happened until hours later.ĭespite that, I keep coming back to Studio because it lets me do things I could only dream of with earlier generations of font editors. And some actions, such as the Append operation, are not undoable. While there is extensive undo function in FontLab, it contains some perversely crude elements. More than once, I performed hours of work, only to have to go back to a previous version of the file because a problem I caused was not immediately apparent. One thing is clear: save frequently, and save multiple versions. The documentation provided with Studio is good, but it does not cover this issue, which I had to resolve through tech support. For example, I performed a simple append operation in a Multiple Master font that resulted in the insertion of extra points, thus ruining the outline. Unlike Fontographer, which is a comparatively simple program, Studio will occasionally give you an unpleasant surprise. I appreciate FontLab’s legendary responsiveness: a reported bug will sometimes be fixed within a day. Excellent free support is available through e-mail. To mine Studio 5’s riches, you will have to study the manual and probably also participate in forums where users share problems and tips. Studio’s extensive OpenType format support lets you build fonts using all the rich capabilities of this new, complex format: huge character sets, infinite ligatures, additional languages, and sophisticated contextual variant support. Most of the font foundries that built font-editing software in the past have now abandoned that practice for Studio 5. Without Studio 5, there is no way to create high-quality TrueType fonts unless you have access to proprietary font editing software. Studio 5 is the only commercially available font editor that edits TrueType directly (all others convert a font to PostScript when you edit it, then reconvert it to TrueType when you generate it-resulting in substantial quality losses). However, for print proofing, Studio has good integration withĚdobe InDesign CS2 ( ), and the two together make a very satisfactory, though expensive, proofing solution. Studio 5 even has a built-in Python editing window. Studio 5 also offers improved integration with the Python programming language that is built-in to Mac OS X, enabling infinite custom programming and scripting capabilities. This is an intriguing and original feature, but I would have been happier if Studio had offered deeper support for traditional foundry-style metrics fitting instead. ![]() The basic idea is that when you are editing a glyph, shape-related glyphs appear in the background, making it easier to keep related shapes in sync. A related new feature is called in-context editing. No font editor could ever do anything like this before. Essentially, it makes your 150 dpi screen look more like a 300 dpi or even 600 dpi screen. The anti-aliasing lets you view much smaller characters on screen than you ever could before, without visible pixel artifacts. Because of its efficient anti-aliasing capabilities, you can use Studio’s novel multi-line Metrics window to show comparatively small lines of text on screen.
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