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.
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.
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.
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.
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 VI 6.1.2 shipped today. That made twelve updates in twelve months after the first public version of our new font editor.
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 6.1 arrived in October 2018. It added standards-compliant components, a Font window sidebar for glyph filtering, and linked metrics expressions.
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.
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.
Automation unlocks the real power of a professional font editor. In this 70-minute tutorial, Adam Twardoch introduces Python scripting inside FontLab Studio 5.
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.
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.
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.
In February 2014, FontLab hosted a live webinar with Matthew Carter, a key figure in digital type design.
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.
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.
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.