It’s webinar time! We hit max capacity of 200 registrants last time we did this webinar, and we want a better recording of it, so we are repeating it! (Already at 90 registrants from email announcement.)
We are pleased to announce that preview builds of FontLab VI are now open to the public! No nondisclosure agreement needed.
See the main FontLab VI page to learn all about the app, preview features, and download a pre‐release build to try it yourself!
Check the public FontLab VI forum to discuss features, interface and implementation, and report bugs to our eagerly waiting team.
We last night made available new Release Candidate builds for FontLab Studio 5.1.5 (Mac) and 5.2.2 (Win).
We are quite hopeful that these will be versions that we will ship to all customers next week. This free update fixes many bugs and issues in 5.1.4 (Mac) and 5.2.1 (Win) — details in the forum post. Literally dozens of issues have been addressed since 5.1.4 and 5.2.1.
FontLab announces today the retirement of co‐founder and corporate business leader Theodore (Ted) Harrison. Harrison will continue as Chairman, but has stepped down from most day‐to‐day operations. Thomas Phinney, who joined FontLab in May 2014, replaces Harrison as FontLab President. The rest of the FontLab team is unchanged, but Adam Twardoch has been promoted to Director of Products, reflecting his increasing focus on the software itself.
At FontLab we have long believed in the value of education. So we have just added to and increased our educational discounts for students and staff, and are additionally adding a time‐limited offer for free posters!
FontLab education pricing is now
half off regular retail
for full versions over $50.
80% off for one‐year license!
Free posters with academic orders over $100 USD!
Legendary type designer, calligrapher and gentleman professor Hermann Zapf died on June 4th, 2015. He was 96 years old. He is survived by his wife, Gudrun Zapf‐von Hesse, a noted book binder, calligrapher and also a type designer (Diotima).
People working with engraving machines and vinyl sign‐cutting machines sometimes ask for special fonts that are made with single‐stroke lines instead of closed shapes. Even though this is not legal in the font formats, it is possible to work around it in FontLab Studio 5 and TypeTool 3. Here’s how, and why you might be fooled into thinking you have failed even when successful.
Please join us for an exciting new free webinar for beginning type designers!
Typerobics: Type design exercises
with Fábio Duarte Martins
Tuesday 16 June 2015
9:00 am Pacific / noon Eastern / 16.00 GMT / 18.00 CEST
Register now!
Are your letters feeling out of shape? Do you aspire to win the regional kerning championship? Typerobics is a type‐making workout regime intended to shape up your Bézier biceps. Every sport requires exercise, and so does type design. Typerobics is your type design fitness plan: pick a word, pick a typographic style, draw that word in under 40 minutes‐then repeat at least three times a week.
I’ve posted a new beta build (5611) of FontLab Studio 5 version 5.1.5.
This is a test version of a free update, which will require you enter your FontLab serial number during the install. I suggest you first rename your existing FontLab Studio 5.app to, say “FontLab Studio 5 old.app” before you install the new build. This way you can run your previous version at any time if the new version proves an unworthy successor in any way. I do not expect it, but it is better to be cautious in such things.
Update April 8, 2015: OS X 10.10.3 shipped today, and as hoped, the final shipping version does not in fact break FontLab Studio 5.1.4 (or 5.1.2; earlier 5.0.x versions are probably also okay but not tested).
We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate our appreciation for our friends and colleagues at Apple: they proactively alerted us to the problem, and then later changed path to avoid triggering it with the actual shipping 10.10.3 update when it came. A class act all around!
As announced April 1, FontLab Studio 5.1.5 build 5568 (release candidate 1) is available (since replaced by FontLab Studio 5.1.5 build 5611, release candidate 2). Because it is possible that a future Mac OS X build will cause the same problem we previously saw, we will continue testing 5.1.5 and expect to make it available in the future.