Fontographer (FOG) is a

font editor A font editor is a class of application software specifically designed to create or modify font files. Font editors differ greatly depending on if they are designed to edit bitmap fonts or outline fonts. Most modern font editors deal with the out ...

for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

; it is used to create digital fonts. It was originally developed by

Altsys Altsys Corporation was a Texas-based software company founded by James R. Von Ehr II. It was an early Apple Macintosh developer and publisher. Three major products from Altsys for PC / Macintosh and NeXT were: *Fontographer for Windows and Mac ...

but is now owned by FontLab Ltd.

History

Altsys Corporation

In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the Altsys Corporation to develop graphics applications for personal computers. The first foray by Altsys into commercial font editing software was a

bitmap font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for prin ...

editor called Fontastic, released in the mid-1980s for the Apple Macintosh. The program, developed by Altsys founder Von Ehr, was able to edit the native bitmap font format of the Mac. It introduced many of the interface elements that would carry over into Fontographer. Fontastic Plus was later introduced with new editing tools and kerning pairs. Fontographer, developed by von Ehr for the Mac and released in January 1986 —before

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

— was the first commercially available

Bézier curve A Bézier curve ( ) is a parametric curve used in computer graphics and related fields. A set of discrete "control points" defines a smooth, continuous curve by means of a formula. Usually the curve is intended to approximate a real-world shape t ...

editing software for a personal computer. High quality fonts in the

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

format could be developed for a fraction of the cost of all other existing methods (

URW URW may refer to: *Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield *Union of Russian Workers *UnReal World, survival video game *Unrestricted Warfare, military strategy *Urawa Station is a junction passenger railway station located in Urawa-ku, Saitama, Japan, operat ...

's Ikarus required systems costing over $100,000), leading to what has been called "the democratization of type design": for the first time in history, numerous self-taught type designers without substantial capital investment produced fonts for professional use. Fontographer 2.0 was released eight months later in the Fall of 1986. With the PostScript background established with Fontographer, Altsys developed FreeHand in 1988 as a Macintosh Postscript-based illustration program using Bézier curves for drawing and editing. In 1989, Fontographer 3.0 was released, featuring an auto-trace tool and automatic generation of hints for Postscript printer fonts.

Macromedia

In January 1995 Altsys was acquired by

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems ...

and both Fontographer and FreeHand were incorporated into the Macromedia product lineup. A new version of Fontographer was included in the Macromedia Graphics Suite, which helped its wider adoption. Although development of the font editor was frozen from 1991, when version 4.1 was released, until 2006, many font and graphics designers continued to use it. The only serious competitor at the time, FontLab (later FontLab Studio), was generally considered more difficult to use, although by 2005 it had overwhelmingly replaced Fontographer for most professional font development.

FontLab

In May 2005, FontLab Ltd. announced that they had licensed distribution rights from Macromedia, and resumed development. They are currently selling Fontographer along with their other products. In December 2005 FontLab shipped a new version of Fontographer for Mac OS, running natively on OS X and featuring numerous bug fixes. They have since exercised their option to buy all rights to Fontographer, so it is now fully owned by FontLab Ltd. In June 2010, Fontographer version 5.0 was released by FontLab. This represents the first major features added to the product since 1996. FontLab has positioned the product as an easier-to-use alternative to FontLab Studio, though without as many of the high-end features needed by professional type designers, and given it a price intermediate between FontLab Studio and their more introductory font editing program TypeTool. In the summer of 2011, Fontlab released Fontographer 5.1. The latest version of Fontographer (5.2) is still a 32-bit application, and the Mac version runs on Mac OS X 10.6.8 to macOS 10.14 Mojave and doesn't run on macOS Catalina 10.15 (released in 2019) and more recent after Apple dropped 32-bit application support.

References

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External links