![]() It combines the best of FontLab Studio 5 and Fontographer 5, and adds support for many new aspects of font technology that have appeared recently, including variable and color OpenType fonts. This is a major upgrade to FontLab VI that brings a total of six years of development, and has been “battle-proven” in countless projects since the release of VI in 2017. If you’ve been hesitant about upgrading to FontLab 7 - do it now.ģ2-bit apps no longer work natively on macOS Catalina FontLab 7 is our modern 64-bit Retina-ready font editor. Here’s the tough news (but keep reading for good news!): FontLab Studio 5. 3 are the definitive versions of these apps for the Mac (visit their pages to get the latest versions if you use older builds!).Īll three of our classic font editors have a long legacy. Their user interfaces and much of internal algorithms use techniques from 1999 or before. This makes the apps robust, and super-fast on today’s computers - but this is thanks to techniques that Apple simply no longer supports. Apple likes to move their operating systems forward, and often leaves vendors and users of various apps behind. It took us well over ten years to develop these apps (and in case of Fontographer, many years more by the original team). It took us two years and several full-time developers (i.e. on ).About 8 man-years) to port FontLab Studio 5, Fontographer 5 and TypeTool 3 for Mac from PowerPC to Intel in 2010. I’m a big fan of Plex myself, and we’re actually using the family within our communication (e.g. At FontLab, we’ll be happy to help transition Plex sources into a more modern workflow. Given how much FontLab VI has progressed in the last 9 months since the initial release, I’m pretty sure that in a year from now, FontLab Studio 5 for Mac will definitely and deservedly be obsolete, though of course the Windows version will continue to run on Windows, and on the Mac via Wine.īut I agree that sticking to the old platform is not a good idea. 6.1 also improves UFO 3 handling a bit more. Version 6.1, due out in a few days, adds native for traditional components, including nested components, so FLVI will no longer change the “source glyph” of a component in some cases, as was the case with 6.0. ![]() But the FLS5 TrueType hinting engine is part of FontLab VI, of course. Adobe might be interested in having a public Could you comment?įontLab Studio 5 is, indeed, at end-of-life. There are a couple of private tools that do this. Storing the PS hints in the UFO can now be done and it shouldn’t be much work to implement compiling it in the font with fontmake.įor the TT hinting to TT instructions, one would have to compile the PS hints into TT instructions. ![]() If I understand correctly, you do PS and TT hinting from the PS hints in FontLab. There are non-standard ways to store the low-level TT instructions (we use VTT instructions but some private tools use fontTools TTX instructions) and there has been some discussion to store a higher-level TT hints (see unified-font-object/ufo-spec#43). The fontmake toolchain does not handle that yet. Since May, the UFO3 spec allows for PS hints to be stored in the UFO in a standard way. It is generated in VTT, roundtripped between the UFO and the VTT TTF with vttLib. For the Dalton Maag workflow, we store the VTT hinting in the UFO data folder. ![]()
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