Utilities for Budding Digital Typefounders

Ever wanted to create your very own fonts or play with the ones you do have? Here are four tools that will let you do it.

In these days of do-it-yourself, people are assembling thier own versions of things from houses to cars to, well, computers. Within every typophile (including ourselves) there’s a digital typefounder that may (or may not) be trying to come out. At the very least, there’s someone who wants to break open the fonts and play with them, to see what makes them tick.

In our travels about the web and the world we’ve found just a palmful of utilities that can let the hopeful creative font artist have thier fun. The four we think we’ll be most likely to use are mentioned hereon.

Most all of these programs not only edit and create fonts, but allow you to convert any font you have in any compatible format to any other compatible formate; you can take your TrueType fonts and make Type 1 fonts of them, a very useful thing. Check the individual program’s capabilities for details, of course.

FontLab Studio 5

This is the current big dog, the top of the line so far. FontLab Studio, by FontLab Ltd., seems to do just about everything. It’s on the expensive end, but if the claims are true, you’ll get what you pay for. It seems to the the current tool for the professional.

It supports all major font formats, including Type 1, True Type, Multiple Master and OpenType. One can open and generate multiple fonts in one step, metrics and kerning editing, previewing, support for Unicode 4.1, Python 2.1 support, saving and exchanging of preferences and multiple workspaces. It even opens Mac fonts when running under Windows.

FontLab Studio is produced by FontLab, Inc, and has a street price of $649, with upgrades from version 4.6 available for $99. Current version is 5.0.2, and current owners can upgrade from version 5.0 for free.

Get the details from FontLab here.

Fontographer

Fontographer is the grandaddy of font creation and editor software, and has been around since before Mac OS 9. Up until recently, for Mac users it was only available as a Carbon application, that is, it only ran under OS X’s “Classic Envrionment”. Altsys–the program’s original producer–sold the application to Macromedia who did no developement, essentially freezing Fontographer in it 4.1 incarnation. Despite this, Fontographer remained popular.

In 2005, however, FontLab aquired Fontographer and began bringing it up to date. It is now at version 4.7 for Macintosh (and is now OS X native) and 4.1.5 for Windows.

Fontographer will edit (or create from scratch) fonts in Type 1, Type 3, TrueType and Multiple Master in both Win and Mac formats, and looks to currently be aimed at the DTP market, the budding professional, and the serious amateur. It retails for $349, and upgraders from 4.1 at $99. Upgrades to 4.3.7 are available to 4.x users at no cost. While Fontographer does not currently create OpenType fonts, FontLabs “Foglamp” application allows FontLab or TransType to read .fog files so that you can produce OpenType fonts from those files.

Also available, as said, from FontLab; go to this page to get the details.

TypeTool

For the tyro, hobbyist, or anyone who wants to change a glyph or have a general mess-around, we have TypeTool. Once again, a FontLab product, TypeTool is available in Mac and Win versions and is comparatively bargain priced.

TypeTool features a simplified, rather intuitive interface, with tools familiar to anyone who has used Illustrator, and will edit and create Type 1, TrueType, and TrueType-based OpenType.

It runs under Win and Mac OS X, and is priced at $99. FontLab’s page on it is here.

FontForge

FontForge in contrast to our previous picks, is Open Source, and free of cost. It claims compatibility with “postscript, TrueType, OpenType, cid-keyed, Multiple Master, cff, svg, and bitmap fonts”.

It is available if forms that should run on Unix/Linux, Macintosh, Windows, and even VMS, and being open source, source code is available so that the do-it-yourselfer can compile custom code from scratch. It is surrounded by an active user community, and the author of the program, George Williams, is an active member of the community and is known for quickly giving straight answers to questions or problems on the Fontforge mailing list.

Being Open Source, of course, one needs to develop a bit of hackerly mojo to install, but compared to some Open Source software, is actually something of an entry-level thing. The developer effectively has nobody to QA the software, so users are advised to treat Fontforge as entry-level software, and to advise him of any bugs they may come upon.

The homepage for Fontforge is here, replete with links to dependencies, doumentation, known issues, and other items, including installation (and uninstalling) advice for all supported OSs.

Any Others Out There?

Noting the preponderance of offerings from FontLab one might wonder why. The answer is simple: there are not too many ready-to-go offerings out there, as least as far as we could find, that were worth mentioning. Especially since the acquisition of Fontographer, FontLab seems to be the big dog in font development software, and if we wanted to start developing our own fonts, we would find the offerings from FontLab the most appealing, and the most polished–at the present time.

There may well be other worthy options we missed. Please feel free to tip us off and we’ll go check them out.