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.
Most testimonials are vibes. Martins’s reads like a release-notes annotation, which is what makes it useful. He runs Scannerlicker out of Portugal, builds fonts, and writes about the editor the way somebody writes about a daily driver they have actually opened.
His full statement on FontLab 8:
This baby is a rock-solid font development software, from design to engineering. Drawing is a joy: FontLab has the best drawing tools I’ve ever seen, and they just got better! FontAudit keeps you in check, with new information and smarter corrections; the new views for masks and layers are a super-handy for designing multiple masters; and the nudging workflow is spot-on.
Expressions and tags became my bread and butter: generate tags to keep you organized in one click, edit them to automate your kerning classes and OT features, copy your expressions to all of your masters with one click!
Did I mention that the new FontLab is a serious variable font production tool, with conditional glyph substitutions, table editing and all? To be honest, I wish I recorded my face when I saw the new axis graph!
FontLab 8 is the juiciest release of FontLab. And hey, it’s running flawlessly on my Linux machine too!
— Fábio Duarte Martins, Scannerlicker
The Linux remark is not throwaway. FontLab ships native binaries for macOS, Windows, and the Windows versions work on Linux with Wine. Most of the working type-design world is on the first two; the people who are on Linux either run a one-person foundry or work inside a larger pipeline where Linux is the only choice. Either way, “running flawlessly on my Linux machine” is an unusually quiet piece of cross-platform engineering for an industry that mostly assumes Mac.