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FontLab

Introducing FontLab 9

FontLab 9 lettering

FontLab 9 for Mac and Windows is now available. Revolutionary stem editing. Ultrasmooth tangents. Curved interpolation. Bracket layers. Optical oblique. Neural spacing & kerning. Visual features. AI, MCP & UI in 19 languages. Buy lifetime: $499. Upgrade from FontLab: $149, $49 or free!

Ask Aidus, FontLab’s built-in assistant powered by a large language model of your choice, anything: ask it about the app, about the current font. Ask it to build Font window filters, to write simple Python scripts, to write proof texts. Create a new glyph with Aidus using context-aware image generation.

Adjust the weight, width and slope of stems across one or several glyphs with the new Stem tool: visually, by units or by percentage. View Thickness consistency along curved and diagonal stems with Quick measurement rainbow.

Draw more confidently with the improved Pen tool: preview the next segment, draw corners, curves and tangents, or refine existing handles. Draw live calligraphic strokes with new Power Brush: use the Thickness tool to change the brush thickness, angle and roundness for every node. Add variation-compatible ink traps.

Ensure perfect G2-smoothness with Genius Tangent nodes when a line segment transitions to curve, and on rounded Smart Corners. Simplify part of a contour with the new Trowel tool, or clear an area with the Cleaner tool. Turn bitmap images into contours more accurately with improved Autotrace.

Turn on Quick Preview on drag and focus on the shape whenenver you drag: all the distractions disappear. Turn all snapping on and off at once with Enable Snapping. Repeat the last command on a different glyph or layer with Repeat.

Interpolate along curves with the Sigma tool. Switch construction partway along the axis with bracket layers. Slant glyphs with Make oblique action that performs automatic optical adjustment.

Kern existing and planned pairs in the new Superkerning panel. Use one set of kerning classes in all masters. Auto Space and Auto Kern with new neural algorithms. Preview multiple font sizes, masters, instances in the new Notepad panel; build and edit specimens, and export then to PDF.

Selectively copy-paste contours, appearance, metrics, anchors, guides, hints or masks across masters with Paste Special. Reuse Skin elements. Reshape elements with the Mesh filter. See which glyphs have contours, components or advanced elements with Color-code element type.

Visually edit and test features for all writing systems in the Lookups editor, test with the step-by-step lookup debugger. Control ligature caret positioning with anchors. Export visual TrueType hints into static and variable fonts with the genuine VTT engine.

Open and export Glyphs 4 files. Import Open Font Format 2026 fonts with cubic TrueType outlines, variable components and avar version 2 mappings. Automate your work with improved Python scripting. Automate FontLab from external scripts and agents with the built-in MCP server.

Use the interface and built-in help in 19 languages: English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Polski, Čeština, हिन्दी, Bahasa Indonesia, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português, Русский, ไทย, Türkçe, Українська, Tiếng Việt, 简体中文, 繁體中文. Learn FontLab 9 from the all-new user manual. Simplify the user interface with Focused Menu. 27 min read →

Vexy Lines

Make your pixels vexy. Play with lines.

Two halftone portraits from the Vexy Playlines landing page

Vexy Playlines turns any photo into vector art in the browser: drop an image, pick one of fourteen algorithmic fills, from classic linear or dotted halftones, to stipple, low-poly, wireframe, ASCII. Drag a slider or two, export SVG! Five fills are free with no sign-up, nothing to install; nine more unlock with a FontLab Pass. Try the quick little cousin of our Mac and Windows Vexy Lines app — built for the ten-minute detour that eats an afternoon. 2 min read →

Vexy Lines

Poor print produces pretty posters

The brutalist remix of Kapr’s 1977 football poster: fluorescent stochastic halftone

In 1977, Albert Kapr squeezed poster style out of cheap GDR paper and a one-colour press. The Vexy Lines case study: retro poster scans his SC Dynamo sheet, rebuilds the halftone photo into a vector signal where stroke thickness answers to luminance, and pours one photograph into three posters: faithful linear, colour-soaked, and full brutalist for the scrolling feed. 2 min read →

Vexy Lines

Type that reads the picture underneath it

A flame rendered entirely from variable-font text, each glyph at its own instance

With Vexy Lines, you can make the most of your variable fonts. Create expressive typographic arrangements, impactful headlines and font specimens. Check out the Vexy Lines case study: Text fill! It typesets your text along the baselines created by the app’s procedural patterns. Each text glyph picks its font size or variable font instance from the brightness of the image beneath it. Sampled per glyph. Mapped to Weight, Width, Optical Size, or any other axis. Exported to SVG & PDF. For foundries who want to show their design spaces flow along pixels. 3 min read →

Vexy Lines

Vexy Lines 2 is here!

Say hello to Vexy Lines 2, with all-new image filters, a stroke-cutting sharp mask, cross-hatching diamond dots, organic wobble & rough strokes, much faster parameter tweaking, and hundreds of other improvements. If you have Vexy Lines 1, it’s free! 7 min read →

Adam Twardoch

Color fonts in 2026: COLR v1, SVG, sbix, and bitmap strikes

In 2013, color OpenType looked like a standards argument with four exits. Apple had sbix. Google had CBDT/CBLC. Microsoft had COLR/CPAL. Adobe and Mozilla had SVG-in-OpenType. The question then was which proposal would win. In 2026, the answer is less tidy and more useful: they all became real OpenType color font formats, but they did not become equally useful everywhere. 8 min read →

Vexy Lines

The hedcut at 45

In 1979, a Wall Street Journal illustrator named Kevin Sprouls introduced a stipple portrait to the paper. Forty-five years later, the same form is still running on the front page. That is unusual enough to warrant an explanation. 2 min read →

Vexy Lines

From Spirograph to Fidenza

The generative line has a genealogy. It runs from a physics lecture in 1815 through a children’s toy in 1965 and a university lab in 2001, and it ends — so far — with an algorithm that sold for five million dollars. 2 min read →

Adam Twardoch

Made with FontLab: Fábio Duarte Martins

Scannerlicker is Fábio Duarte Martins’s foundry, and his testimonial is one of the few that actually names the FontLab features doing the work. It is, accidentally, a short manual on what to learn first. 2 min read →

Vexy Lines

Seurat and the 220,000 dots

Georges Seurat spent two years applying roughly 220,000 dots to a canvas. The painting works because the dots don’t blend on the canvas. They blend in your eye. 2 min read →

FontLab

The four-stack of screen rendering

Most type designers know their fonts will be rendered differently on macOS and Windows. Fewer know the names of the four pieces of plumbing responsible. The names are worth knowing, because the plumbing shapes everything. 3 min read →

FontLab

FontLab TV: glyph construction from scratch

The first letter is the hardest. The FontLab TV glyph construction episode is a calm, deliberate walkthrough of drawing one letter — n — from a blank glyph cell to a finished, point-clean contour you can build a font around. 2 min read →