FontLab
Fontographer 5

Description

Fontographer 5 is the font editor for designers that boasts a user-friendly interface combined with the engine from FontLab’s high-end tool FontLab Studio.

Besides providing all the tools necessary to create a font from scratch, (including generating glyphs from scanned drawings and copy/paste from Adobe Illustratoror FreeHand), Fontographer provides tremendously helpful tools for graphic design studios.

For example, if you have a thin or thick version of a font but need something in-between, Fontographer can generate new fonts with thicknesses between the two. It can also create a condensed version of a font (that isn’t simply horizontally scalled), and generate true composite fractions from existing single numbers.

Fontographer can also automatically generate new spacing (or it lets you manually generate spacing) for fonts you want to change the letter spacing or kerning for. You can also add new glyphs to an existing font (such as a company logo, icons, or even a missing character). All these features can be invaluable when the font you’re using isn’t as expansive or professional as you need.

You can also use Fontographer to professionally convert fonts from one format to another. You can convert a font to OpenType, TrueType (Mac or Windows), PostScript Type 1 or 3 (Mac, Windows, or Unix/ASCII), or the now-defunct Multiple Master (Mac or Windows) with just a few clicks. It also reads Mac Type 1 font suitcases (FFIL), Mac datafork suitcases (.dfont), and TrueType Collections (.ttc).

Fontographer’s latest version boasts improvements such as the ability to import and export projects in the FontLab Studio format, which makes it easier to collaborate. It now displays smooth anti-aliased outlines, zooms up to 1600 percent, provides expanded Unicode and encoding tables, offers a redesigned Font Info dialogue with intelligent font family naming, has a powerful new Glyph Search feature, and accepts most bitmap formats for autotracing.

Fontographer comes with sample files, such as various styles of fonts, accents, scanned characters, and .eps (encapsulated PostScript) files to practice with, and a text file of common words that look best when their letter pairs are kerned.

“Every design studio should have Fontographer 5 for its wealth of font creation, editing, fixing, and conversion abilities.” —MacWorld

Benefits

• Create new fonts
• Customise existing fonts, add extra characters
• Fine-tune spacing and kerning
• Fix problems in bad fonts
• Convert old fonts to a new format

Created with the designers in mind

Unlike any other font editor on the market, Fontographer 5 combines an easy, intuitive and very efficient user interface with state-of-the-art font creation technology, making it a perfect font editor for graphic designers, DTP professionals, calligraphers and type designers who do not with to dive into the technical details of font creation.

Operating system and application support

• IMPROVED! Runs natively on Mac OS X (universal binary), Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7
• IMPROVED! Copy-paste and import-export of Illustrator and Freehand outline artwork
• IMPROVED! Copy-paste and import bitmap images for autotracing plus countless additional improvements and bug fixes.

This is the release that the font software community has been waiting for more than a decade!