Macworld Forums: Fontographer 5 - Macworld Forums

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Fontographer 5 sounds fine, but I would interested in knowing more about how well it handles kerning pairs, and the set of controls you have for that at your disposal.

I've found that to be the hardest aspect of font design - as well as one of the most important. The last time I tried out Fontographer and FontLab, I found FontLab to be vastly superior at handling this function over Fontographer.

I notice the upgrade price of $199 goes back to previous Macromedia versions as early as v.3, not just FontLab's last version. That's pretty good as I still have version 4 that was from the Mac OS 9 era. Very interesting that it still copy/pastes from FreeHand as it shows its roots are still honored from the Altsys/Macromedia ownership.
Although I'm not a type designer, I do have need for this at times when clients need a dingbat or character set exclusive to their company or book project. I'll have to check this out.

XMattingly: You can download their EXCELLENT product manual for free at http://www.font.to/d...4MacManual.pdf. It should contain all the details you need about Fontographer's tools for kerning.

XMattingly, on 06 October 2010 - 05:44 AM, said:

You can download their EXCELLENT product manual for free at http://www.font.to/d...G4MacManual.pdf. It should contain all the details you need about Fontographer's tools for kerning.

The OS 9 version of Fontographer could automatically generate kerning pairs from character outlines of an Adobe font that were virtually indistinguishable from those Adobe crafted themselves.
it was an application that proved to be much more valuable than I had ever foreseen. Before Illustrate had brush symbols and path patterns, if I wanted to draw something with repetitive shapes like leaves, I'd made a font of leaf variations and use the text on a path tool.
For embedded fonts in Flash, I'd use it to replace irrelevant characters with special use requirements.
Used it to create a font of arcane cryptic Matrix-like code symbol for particle effects in After Effects.