Fontlab Studio 5

Fontlab Studio by Fontlabs is a professional grade software program for type designers. It is used all over the world by typographers, type designers and graphic studios to create or edit fonts. Fontlab Studio supports all the major font formats such as True Type, Type 1, Multiple Master and Open Type. Compatible with Mac or Windows, this is the program to use when dealing with Fonts. Font developers should not have a problem with this program as for the last 30 years this has been the font standard font technology with only one other competitor being Macromedia Fontographer. Beginners such as me though, have another story to tell. I strongly suggest for beginners to use the tutorials given on Fontlabs website. There are plenty to read and watch such as the videos on YouTube which also explains the use and how-to’s of this program. Also, new words to grasp such as glyphs, hinting, kerning, etc should be put in your vocabulary as you will be using them and not to know them will find you at a disadvantage in trying to learn. There is also a free demo of Fontlab Studio that you can download and learn before buying to see if this product is right for you. The only downside to the demo though, is that you are limited to the amount of fonts you can export or save of your work. The installation of Fontlab Studio on your computer is a straight forward process. After opening the program the layout finds you looking at dockable toolbars which can be turned on or off depending on what phase of the work flow you are on. Since I know you would have taken my advice on viewing the tutorials first, now is the time to play with the program itself using the tips given by the tutorials. Go through all of the menus and tools to see where they are and generalize yourself with what they do. When you are ready to actually work on a character glyph, click on “file” in the menu bar and “new”.

This is pretty much to it to begin to start to learn Fontlab Studio, particularly if you have never worked with it before. Tutorials and actually jumping in working with the glyphs is the only way you are going to learn. After the new window opens with the glyph you have chosen, and you start editing with the tools using the guides and gridlines, your work starts to take on an intuitive flow. Keep in mind before or as you edit you must have a design in mind for your characters. When you have that design in place, the other characters you will be using should have that same type of design applied to it. This is where the transformation filters come in handy. Instead of tweaking each character individually, you can apply the filter or filters you have setup for more than one character at a time, speeding up your workflow. Each filter is also tweakable allowing for hundreds of custom designs for each character set. Because I am not in the business of selling fonts as some do for a living or on the side, I realized with relief that I did not have to make up or edit every character in the alphabet. For me, I just edit the characters I need for a particular project. This way, I do not spend time working on every alphabet that I am not going to use! However, there are those that do this for a living and to protect the author there are features in Fontlab Studio that provide imbedding options for your completed work with copyright and author information. You will find that the work you put into designing your fonts is worth protecting from others to call their own or to use without giving you credit. If you find this program out of your budget or simply too much to learn, maybe Type Tool by Fontlab is a better choice. Type Tool is a basic font editor for beginners or for use by professionals who occasionally will design or edit fonts. It does not have all the bells and whistles that you will use once you become a pro at designing. Try either one, the free demos are available at www.fontlab.com. If you would like to compare the different versions of programs to decide which is best for your budget or project go to: http://www.fontlab.com/fontlab-products/compare/. Enjoy!