FontLab Pad 2: get the look you want, then paste it where you need it

You found a font you love, and your app is showing you a fraction of it. With FontLab Pad 2 you try the font without installing it, set your headline exactly the way you want it, and paste the result into whatever you are working in. Pad has been free for ten years, and it still is!

You downloaded a variable font with a hundred usable styles, and your layout app offers you Regular and Bold. You bought a color font, and the letters arrive black. You want the swash version of that one g, and the app has no way to let you ask for it. None of that is your fault, and none of it needs to cost you an afternoon: open the font in Pad, get the words looking right there, and carry the result over.

Skip the install, and keep your system fast

Installing a font to try it is a small tax you pay every time. The app you want to use it in may not see the new font until you quit and reopen it. If you already own three fonts called Garamond, your system will quietly show you one of them and hide the rest, with no error and no note about which one you got. And if you keep saying yes to every font you download, you end up with 5,000 of them installed, at which point even a fast machine starts to think about it.

None of that has to happen. With FontLab Pad 2 you open the font file where it lies, type your text, choose the instance you want, insert a variant glyph if the design has one, then copy the result as PDF, SVG or Bitmap and paste it into Figma, PowerPoint, Keynote, or really anything else you work in. The font never touches your system, and your font menus stay as short as you like them.

Use the style your app won’t show you

A variable font holds far more than the handful of styles that turn up in a menu, and in Pad 2 all of them are yours. Pick a named instance from the sidebar, or take the sliders and find the weight between Medium and Semibold that your logo actually wants, typing exact axis numbers when you need to hit the same style twice. Your text and formatting stay put while you hunt, so you are always judging the real words, and the header tells you where you have landed: family name, and either the style or the coordinates you dialed. If you work with old multiple-master Type 1 designs, you can interpolate those too.

Get your color fonts to look like themselves

Color fonts are better served in Pad 2 than they have ever been, variable color fonts included, so you can move an axis and watch the palette and the shapes respond together. If your design app flattens a color font to black, or refuses it outright, Pad gives you the artwork as it was drawn, ready to copy or export. We have been rendering these since 2014, when almost nothing else on your desktop would.

Set Arabic and Hebrew the way they should be set

Right-to-left scripts are handled considerably better in Pad 2. Your text runs in the right direction, the line layout comes out as you intended, and the cursor lands where you expect it to, so you can give your attention to the typography.

Reach the alternate you actually wanted

Select a letter, press the / key, and type a glyph name or a character: the swash, the stylistic alternate, the ligature that your app keeps hidden behind a panel you don’t have. The picker shows each variant in the instance you are currently using, so you are choosing with your eyes rather than guessing from a list of names.

Take it with you in the shape you need

When the words look right, you decide how they travel. Copy them as Bitmap, SVG or PDF and paste straight into your design, or save a PNG, SVG or PDF file to place later. Pad remembers the format you used last time, so the second and the tenth trip cost you one click, and it carries your color and layout across intact. If you set your type over a transparent background to check it against your artwork, that is what you get on the other side.

What you can open, and what you need to run it

Pad opens static and variable OpenType, color OpenType in SVG, sbix, COLR/CPAL and CBDT/CBLC flavors, Type 1 and multiple-master fonts, WOFF web fonts, Photofont and SVG fonts. On the Mac it is a true universal app, so it runs at full speed whether you are on Apple silicon or Intel. You need macOS 10.15 or newer, or Windows 10 or newer, and you can use it on every device in your household or organization.

Get FontLab Pad 2

Download FontLab Pad 2 for Mac & Windows →

Ready to make your own fonts? Create static, variable and color OpenType fonts with FontLab 8, then try them out in Pad.