Review: Fontographer 4.7.2
- Article 4 of 9
- Computer Arts, February 2006
The font tool time forgot is back after a decade.
For many long-time Mac users, Fontographer is a blast from the past. Created by AltSys in 1985, Fontographer was the first font creation program of note for the Mac, or any computer. But all good things come to an end. Macromedia bought the package in the mid-90s and then pretty much ignored it.
But now it's back. FontLab, which developed the low-end TypeTool and the high-end FontLab Studio to support emerging font types such as OpenType, bought Fontographer from Macromedia in May 2005, and in December it released the first Mac OS X-compatible version of Fontographer – version 4.7.1.
Fontographer's virtue is in its relative ease of use. For designers used to programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop, Fontographer's tools are intuitive and easy to understand. To start, just import an existing font and modify characters as though they were vector illustrations with standard points and handles. Alternatively, you could create the character in a program of your choice then import it into Fontographer directly or scan and trace your own artwork using the software's Autotrace function.
Once the typeface looks the way you like it, you can use the Autokern and Hinting functions to ensure that all your characters fit together and display well at all sizes with the minimum of effort on your part. You can also use the program's manual options to override anything. Export formats include both Mac and PC, so you can be assured of crossplatform compatibility.
But is it worth its £200-plus price tag? If you still have an OS 9 copy of Fontographer, your only good reason for upgrading would be to get OS X compatibility or support for the euro symbol in your typefaces. Virtually no significant features have been added to this first release of the new Fontographer. Nevertheless, if you're a newcomer to font design or are simply looking for an alternative application, don't let that put you off. Fontographer may have been stuck in suspended animation for a decade, but it's still amazing how advanced the program remains after all this time; in fact, it lacks only a handful of the features found in the high-end FontLab Studio.
While it's relatively pricey for a one-function package, for the most part Fontographer has all you need to create typefaces. If you can hold out until version 5.0 we recommend you do. However, an investment in Fontographer now is nothing to be ashamed of…