TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:41:10 EST 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

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FontStudio 2.0

FontStudio was a font creation tool from Letraset that is no longer available. However, that does not mean it is obsolete, au contraire! Great typographers like Akira Kobayashi swear by it. As Lucas de Groot puts it: "Apart from paper and paper tools, nothing but FontStudio 2.0 for designing glyphs! Absolute precision, speed, huge amount of shortcuts and convienient stuff in the drawing area, auto-import of scans, best metrics/kerning tools, etc. It takes a while to get into it, to get to know the quirks. Too bad it's so difficult to buy these days." John Hudson adds: "FontStudio is a small, but very good PostScript (Type 1) font tool, which is no longer in production. There are certainly designers who swear by it, and we use it ourselves when we need to globally adjust kerning pair data and other small jobs which it still does better than any of the current programs. It does not, however, do TrueType hinting, nor even have native TT outline editing." Olivier Randier provides this glowing testimony: "FontStudio is a great software. Maybe a little difficult to learn when you begin (especially when you need to translate the handbook and the interface in French yourself), but how powerfull! The kerning editor still has no equivalent, I think (except maybe FontLab, but I'm not sure). The drawing interface is extremely precise and has functions I still wait for in Illustrator (OK, with PathFinder, Illustrator past through, now, but some things are still easier in FontStudio). I bought it ten years ago with my SE30 (MacOS 6) and it still bravely works on my G3 (MacOS 8)... OK, now it's getting old, because of new font formats, like OpenType, and other new technologies (plug-in, vector antialiasing, layers...), and it would need to be refreshed. I asked Adobe if they intented to keep on upgrading it, they said font editing softwares don't pay enough. They prefer to rely on Microsoft softwares;(Now, I'm thinking about migrating to FontLab, but I will probably use it mainly for format conversion and cross-encoding kerning and stick to FontStudio for the drawing work, because I'm too much used to it, now. Really, if you work much on type, you should give it a try. As for Fontographer, I really can't work with, the interface is ugly, hardly legible for drawing, and kerning editor is nothing. But it may be a question of culture: I think people used to draw with Freehand would prefer Fontographer's look and feel, people used to Illustrator will find FontStudio more familiar. Fontographer feels like a toy for me, I really can't imagine seriously making a professional job with it." And Martin Archer says: "FontStudio was a much more humane program to use than Fog. Unfortunately it won't run on newer machines or on OS9 or newer. It had a fantastic range of zoom, the bezier tools worked intelligently, it had a superb background layer facilty and it had none of those stupid sound effects. I don't understand Adobe not releasing a commercial font creation program. How do they expect designers to make fonts to use with their graphics programs - by buying Macromedia's Fontographer? A mix of Fog and Fontstudio would have made designing a little easier when I still did it a few years back. I imagine that if I were designing fonts now I'd finish all the shapes in Illustrator and leave just the encoding part to Fog or whatever other program does that - although clearly just getting outlines into Fog is a pain in the neck. "

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