FontLab® 3.0
the advanced font editing tool
created by: Pyrus North America, Ltd.
website: www.pyrus.com
suggested retail price: $399 US
reviewed by: S. Roland Frantz
FontLab is a welcome addition to the professional type designer’s toolbox. It has plenty of advanced features to please the most discriminating font developer and craftsman, while also providing an easy to learn and use interface which makes font creation accessible to the beginning designer as well. Pyrus North America is exclusively devoted to creating tools for type design and has given a lot of attention to incorporating features that greatly facilitate the font creation process, including several features sorely missing in the main competing product, Macromedia®’s Fontographer®. Since only these two products currently exist in this market niche, it is unavoidable to review one without direct comparison of features.
I found one of the best new (& essential) features in FontLab to be the dockable toolbars. There are separate toolbars for the application window, the font window-where the entire font is displayed, and for the glyph editing window-where the individual characters are edited. There are the typical Windows buttons for the common actions, such as new, save, and open, and also application specific buttons to toggle on and off the different views or layers: outline, preview, grid, guidelines, nodes, control handles, bitmap template and mask layers. In the font and glyph windows there are more buttons to access the font information menu; move forwards and backwards through the character set; access the selection, drawing and transformation tools; zoom in and out; and the always essential undo and redo buttons.
The layout grid and adjustable guidelines are another great feature. You can set global & local guidelines (they are in different colors from the grid and the baseline and side-bearings, thankfully, unlike in Fog) and you can even set diagonal guidelines! Wow, this alone is reason to switch for me.
The font information menu, where one sets the font names, style, copyright, embedding permissions, and more, is arranged in a set of tabbed menus with clearly labeled text fields and radio buttons. You can even have it generate the various names and other data automatically after filling in a few basic fields. This is a vast improvement over Fontographer with its arcanely-labeled and buried menu selections.
You can open and edit TrueType and Type 1 fonts as well as create one from scratch. The font window has the option of displaying a small bitmap of each character in the empty or undefined slots so you can quickly locate the character you want to create and don’t have to squint at the label of the character slot. You can, of course, adjust the size of the display of the slots as well. You may also cut and paste or drag and drop characters from place to place and even from font to font.
On the downside, when you are ready to create a new glyph, you must double-click to clear the sample bitmap image from an undefined slot and then double-click again (or right-click & choose edit from the fly-out menu) to open a glyph window for editing. This could certainly be simplified.
Once in the glyph edit window, the ‘next’ button takes you to the next defined character and not to the next character in the encoding. When building a new font, you must switch to the font window and double-click, double-click, which significantly slows the creation process. I’ve asked for a second forward button to remedy this situation. In the meantime, I work around this effectively by clearing all the bitmaps for the range of characters I want to create before opening a glyph edit window, then I can move through them quickly with the next button.
FontLab comes with a great set of transformation filters which can be applied to a single character, a range of selected characters, or the whole font, with just a click or two, instead of hours of meticulous hand-tweaking. Particularly fun are the shadow, 3D rotate and 3D extrusion filters and one humorously called college, which creates an outline/inline version reminiscent of college letter sweaters. There is also a unique envelope filter, which deforms the glyphs to fit into your choice of a set of predefined shapes. All of the filters allow you to tweak their parameters for all kinds of custom effects and to preview them beforehand.
Of special note are the aptly named ‘vector paint’ tools, a collection of drawing tools with which you can create your individual glyphs. Outlines are automatically closed and overlapping is automatically corrected when using these tools. The only shortfall here is the lack of support for pressure sensitive tablets, but given their reputation for incorporating suggestions from users in a matter of days into free downloadable updates, this should soon be available.
For the extremely anal-retentive typographer (& show me a good one who isn’t) there is an exclusive tool called FontAudit which analyses each glyph for possible problems and recommends corrections. You can then choose to fix each node individually or all similar errors automatically. The algorithm behind this process can be customized too.
In regards to node editing, there are a few omissions I hope to see corrected in future versions. One of my favorite Fontographer tools is the ‘clean up paths’ command. I create many of my fonts from scanned drawings and despite careful calibration of my vector tracing program, I usually have plenty of excess nodes. In FontLab, the FontAudit tool and an operation called ‘curve’ (which allows you to select a group of nodes and approximate them with a single curve) address this problem, but require a much more time-consuming process.
Another of my favorite Fontographer operations is the ‘correct path direction’ command which correctly alternates the path directions and thus the corresponding fill/no fill or ‘winding’ of the glyph outlines. In FontLab this is usually automatic, but not always. You can change an individual contour (a.k.a. path) direction with a right click menu selection or you can reverse all contours, but you can’t simply correct the winding for the whole glyph with a single click. This is a pretty simple algorithm and I believe could be easily corrected.
For the advanced typographer, there is support for Unicode and virtually every codepage and encoding vector known to mankind, plus editing and creation of custom codepages, advanced hinting and metrics tools, type 1 multiple master (4 axes) creation, and lots more.
The 371-page manual and extensive help file are fairly thorough and helpful, although I still remain baffled when it comes to all the different encodings. They also have an online forum and good tech support.
This program is very deep and although the learning curve is not at all steep, I feel I have only grazed the surface of its capabilities in two weeks of testing, which I think is the hallmark of a great application.
Despite its few shortcomings, I am extremely pleased and excited with this program. Its multitude of advanced features far outweigh the few oversights and make it well worth the investment. As an added incentive, Pyrus will soon make it available at a competitive upgrade price of only $99. They also have a variety of other type creation & editing applications for various levels of expertise and price. Demo (no saves) or trial (5 saves) versions of all are available at their website.
Look out Fontographer! I think we have a new leader in this field.
Stanley Roland Frantz
Graphic Design, Web Development, & Typography
www.syndesigns.comnote: this is an unsolicited review, product was purchased by reviewer.
Product: FontLab 3.0
Category: Font creation & editing
Company: Pyrus N. A., Ltd.
Address: Box 465
City/State/Zip: Millersville, MD 21108 USA
Telephone: (410) 987-5616
WWW Site Address: www.pyrus.com
MSRP of Program: $399
Minimum PC Configuration: 486 or faster with 8 Mb Ram, VGA, HDD & mouse
Minimum Macintosh Configuration: NA
Tested on: Win98, 333MHz Pentium II, 96 Mg RAM
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