FontLab Blog

Five centuries of line — Dürer, Hogarth, Bewick, Doré

Vexy Lines — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:54:37 +0000

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A line can carry tone, texture, shadow, and emotion — and never once pretend to be a photograph. That is the whole argument of five centuries of printmaking, made with a burin, a graver, and eventually a stylus.

Calfonts: italics that aren’t just slanted romans

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:14:13 +0000

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Italics are the part of a font family that most often gets shipped wrong — slanted romans, no cursive structure, lopsided ovals. The Calfonts italic tutorial walks through what it actually takes to draw an italic that earns its place next to the roman.

Briem: how to draw an italic (and why the slanted-roman trap is real)

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:09:20 +0000

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Italic is not roman tilted to the right. Slant your upright a and what you get is a tilted a, not an italic a — the structure is wrong, the rhythm is wrong, the connection points are wrong.

Color fonts: the next big thing? A FontLab tutorial

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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Back in 2014, color fonts were a brand new frontier. This 103-minute tutorial with Adam Twardoch was one of the first deep dives into how to actually make them.

Basics of Python scripting in FontLab Studio 5

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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Automation unlocks the real power of a professional font editor. In this 70-minute tutorial, Adam Twardoch introduces Python scripting inside FontLab Studio 5.

How to space a font

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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Spacing is where type design lives or dies. In this 53-minute tutorial, Thomas Phinney walks through sidebearings, optical principles, and the practical workflow inside FontLab Studio 5.

FontLab VI 6.1: components, sidebar filters, and metrics expressions

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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FontLab VI 6.1 arrived in October 2018. It added standards-compliant components, a Font window sidebar for glyph filtering, and linked metrics expressions.

Introducing FontLab 7: the pro font editor, evolved

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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FontLab 7 is a major upgrade to FontLab VI, arriving after a summer and autumn of concentrated work, with more than 250 new features, fixes, and improvements.

Bézier and de Casteljau: two engineers, one beautiful curve

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:08:42 +0000

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In 1958, Paul de Casteljau at Citroën worked out the mathematics of the curves we now draw with every day. A few years later Pierre Bézier at Renault arrived at the same idea independently and published it in 1962.

FontLab Studio 5 and the Fontographer acquisition

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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2005 was a pivotal year for Fontlab Ltd. The company shipped FontLab Studio 5, which became the dominant professional font editor for the next decade. FontLab also acquired Fontographer from Macromedia, reviving a tool that had been dormant since the mid-1990s.

TransType 4 for Mac and Windows

TransType — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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TransType 4 arrived in December 2013 as a complete rewrite of our font conversion app. It added multi-color OpenType output and web font export to its core toolkit.

FontLab Studio 5.2.1 for Windows

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab Studio 5.2.1 for Windows shipped in December 2013. It builds on the 5.2 foundation with new tools and hundreds of bug fixes.

Matthew Carter webinar

Adam Twardoch — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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In February 2014, FontLab hosted a live webinar with Matthew Carter, a key figure in digital type design.

Brush Romans webinar with John Downer and Paul Herrera

Adam Twardoch — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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On March 11, 2014, FontLab hosted a webinar on Roman capital letterforms and their origins in flat-brush writing. Sign painter and type designer John Downer presented alongside calligrapher Paul Herrera.

DTL OTMaster 5.0, vfb2ufo, and FontLab Pad 1.1

FontLab Pad — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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December 2014 brought a major update to DTL OTMaster, plus two new free tools. We released a command-line UFO converter and an updated color font typesetter.

FontLab VI is here

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab Studio 5 was a workhorse. It shipped in 2004 and carried a generation of type designers through the OpenType transition. The app aged gracefully, right up until it didn’t. On 7 December 2017, we replaced it.

DTL OTMaster 7.9 available now

Adam Twardoch — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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DTL OTMaster 7.9 adds support for variable OpenType fonts. This includes the fvar, gvar, CFF2, STAT, HVAR, and MVAR tables. It includes a new Proofing Tool for printing and exporting PDF specimens, and a Side-by-Side Viewer that shows variation instances.

Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. A full license is US$228. Upgrades from previous versions are US$57.

FontLab VI: 12 releases in 12 months

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab VI 6.1.2 shipped today. That made twelve updates in twelve months after the first public version of our new font editor.

Design space axes and multiple masters in FontLab VI

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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Variable fonts force you to think in multiple dimensions at once. This four-minute video shows exactly how to set up a design space with axes and masters in FontLab VI. It gives you a concise, visual introduction to the core concepts behind variable font production.

From sketch to font in minutes with built-in ScanFont

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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This two-minute demo of the built-in ScanFont feature has over 40,000 views. It earns that attention by showing something genuinely useful in record time. You scan or photograph hand-drawn letterforms, paste them into FontLab, and the software traces them into editable outlines.

FontLab Studio 5, Fontographer 5 and TypeTool 3 on macOS 10.15 Catalina

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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macOS 10.15 Catalina drops all 32-bit app support, which means FontLab Studio 5, Fontographer 5, TypeTool 3, and BitFonter 3 for Mac will not run on it — and porting them to 64-bit is not feasible. If you are on Catalina, your options are CrossOver Mac 19 (run the Windows versions via a thin emulation layer), a virtual machine running an older macOS or Windows, or upgrading to the 64-bit FontLab 7.

FontLab 7.1: ink traps, harmonized handles, and quick measurement

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab 7.1 landed in March 2020 as a free update to all FontLab 7 users, delivering over 70 new and improved features and 80 fixes across five point releases between March and August 2020. The headline additions — ink traps, harmonized handles, looped corners, and quick measurement — gave designers finer control over node behavior and optical geometry than any prior version.

Say hello to FontLab 7.2

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab 7.2 is a free update with 120 new or improved features. The headline: interpolation now runs 30× faster. New tools include Rotate, Scale, and Slant; an adaptive freeform grid with Suggest Distance; variable and attached components; visual OpenType feature proofing; and Microsoft VOLT integration. Existing FontLab 7 users get it free; FontLab VI users can upgrade for $99.

Import artwork into FontLab 7

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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Most type designers don’t draw directly in the font editor — they sketch in pencil, refine in Illustrator or Affinity Designer, then need to get that artwork into FontLab cleanly. This eight-minute video from Dave Lawrence’s FontLab 7 series shows exactly how.

Basics of spacing in FontLab 7

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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Spacing is the invisible work that determines whether a font feels effortless or labored to read. This five-minute tutorial from Dave Lawrence’s FontLab 7 series strips the topic down to its essentials: what sidebearings are, how to set them in the metrics window, and how to evaluate spacing visually as you work.

FontLab 7: a year in updates

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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FontLab 7 launched in December 2019 with over 250 new features. Twelve months later, it has rather more than that. Here is what the 2020 update cycle actually delivered — not counting FontLab 7.2, which has its own post.

Make your variable fonts better with FontLab 7

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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This 19-minute presentation by Adam Twardoch, delivered at ATypI Tech Talks 2021, goes beyond building variable fonts to the harder question: making them good. It covers quality assurance, interpolation checking, and the tools in FontLab 7 and related applications that help catch problems before a variable font ships.

Rescue your PostScript Type 1 fonts

TransType — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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PostScript Type 1 fonts are on their way out. Adobe is ending Type 1 support in Creative Cloud applications in early 2023, and Apple has signalled the same direction in macOS. If you have a library of Type 1 fonts — and many working designers do — now is the time to convert them to OpenType.

FontLab 7.2.0.7644 and macOS 12.3 Monterey

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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Apple’s macOS 12.3 Monterey update broke all previous versions of FontLab 7 by removing the system Python 2.7 that FontLab depended on. FontLab 7.2.0.7644 is a free patch that restores compatibility — macOS 12.3 users need to install a bundled Python 2.7 package alongside the app. A buggy intermediate build (7650) that made glyph fills transparent was withdrawn; 7644 does not have that problem.

Hello, FontLab 8

FontLab — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:04:56 +0000

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Two years into FontLab 7, users had a clear message: the drawing engine is excellent, the variable font support is solid, now make the rest of the application match. FontLab 8, shipping today, is our answer.