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About

Fontlab Ltd. has been making font editors since 1992 — longer than most of the fonts on your computer have existed. We build the professional tools that type designers use to create, modify, and ship fonts: from quick pixel doodles to the complex variable OpenType families shipping inside major operating systems. If you have used a computer in the last thirty years, you have almost certainly set text in a font made with one of our apps.

A short history

The company began as Pyrus North America Ltd., established in 1992 to distribute software produced by SoftUnion Ltd. of St. Petersburg, Russia. The first product, FontLab 2.0 for Windows, appeared in 1993 — one of the first digital font editors for Windows. Version 2.5 followed in 1994 with TrueType editing, which put FontLab at the head of its class on Windows. That same year ScanFont and FindFont shipped alongside it.

In 1995, SoftUnion divested its software operations to focus on hardware. Pyrus acquired all rights to FontLab and retained Yuri Yarmola, head of the original programming team, to continue development. The years that followed brought FontLab Composer (1996, with CJK support), TypeTool (1997, a streamlined entry-level editor), and FontLab 3.0 for Windows (1998, a complete rewrite with custom TrueType hinting and VectorPaint tools). The Mac platform arrived that same year with a port of Composer.

In 1999, TransType launched — a Mac utility for converting fonts between Windows and Mac formats — followed by the full port of FontLab 3.0 to macOS.

In January 2000, a new company, Fontlab Ltd., acquired all assets of Pyrus NA. The new entity released TransType 2 and BitFonter (a dedicated bitmap font editor) in 2001. That same year saw two firsts: the Photofont specification, an XML-based format for text-searchable color bitmap fonts (now an interchange format for color OpenType), and FontLab 4 for Windows, the first FontLab release with OpenType editing capability. AsiaFont Studio followed in 2002, consolidating CJKV font editing into a single product (its features are now part of FontLab).

FontLab Studio 5 shipped in 2005 and became the de facto industry standard for type design and font production. Adobe, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype, Morisawa, and nearly every major font foundry in the world worked on their designs in it. That same year, Fontlab Ltd. licensed Fontographer from Macromedia and resumed its development — the classic that introduced Bézier curve editing to font tools. Fontographer 5 was released in 2010.

In 2013, TransType 4 arrived as a complete rewrite: it organized font families, fixed font problems, converted fonts to WOFF and EOT web formats, and let users work with both monochrome and multi-color fonts.

FontLab VI launched in 2017 as a full rewrite of the flagship editor. It was the first font editor on both macOS and Windows capable of opening and creating variable OpenType fonts and all flavors of color OpenType fonts, including OpenType SVG. FontLab 7 followed in 2019 with over 250 new features. FontLab 8 arrived in 2022 as the largest upgrade to date: an integrated environment covering drawing, spacing, kerning, hinting, and export for desktop, web, color, and variable fonts.

The team

  • Adam — President
  • Yuri — Lead Development
  • Dima — Development
  • Sofia — Development
  • Alex — Help & Support
  • Igor — Help & Support
  • Lisa — Sales
  • Julia — Sys Admin

What we make now

Our current product line covers the full range of font work. FontLab 8 is the complete professional font editor for macOS and Windows. Fontographer 5 offers a cleaner, less intimidating path for designers who need a capable editor without the full feature set. TypeTool handles basic font editing. BitFonter covers bitmap and color bitmap fonts. TransType 4 converts between formats and generates web fonts. FontLab Pad, a free app, lets anyone use color fonts anywhere on macOS and Windows.

Type designers around the world have used our tools to create fonts you encounter daily: Adelle, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Helvetica World, Myriad Pro, Palatino nova, PT Sans, Zapfino Extra, and tens of thousands more. We are a small company. We take that as a point of pride.