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Review of Macromedia Fontographer 4.1
Review of FontLab 4
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1
Macromedia Inc. Software Requirements
· 386 or higher, Any Mac Price: $349 FontLab 4
Fontlab Ltd. Software Requirements
· 8 MB RAM Price: $549 |
If you are a frequent visitor to this site, you are most likely a user of CorelDRAW. If we go back to the very first version of Draw, there were 50 fonts included in the box. At the time this was a wealth of fonts that had never been seen before. With CorelDRAW 3, the number had increased to 250 and the number has now reached over 1000. So, you've undoubtedly gotten every font you'll ever need, right? Very few of you can say no. You either like the freedom of having new designs to work with or you just never know what a client will require.
Well what if you need a font that doesn't exist yet? Again, there is a link to CorelDRAW here. With the export filters for PFB and TTF, you can create all the PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts that you could ever want. These filters are great for creating the character shapes and some very crude spacing, but they just don't cut it as a full-fledged font creation tool and they weren't meant to do that.
Which brings us to two tools dedicated to font creation, Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 and FontLab 4. In the mainstream, these are the two major products. There are a few other very high-end tools used within foundries that are simply overkill for someone needing to create fonts. I'll go over each product separately and then recommend which product will best suit your font creation needs.
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Macromedia Fontographer is the granddaddy of desktop font creation software dating back to the late 80s on the Mac with a debut on the PC in the early 90s. The last new release was back in the spring of 1996 so you won't find all the latest and greatest technologies.
While you can certainly start with a blank slate, I think most users will start with an existing font. Maybe it is something that is missing an important character or maybe it is something you designed in CorelDRAW. When opening files, you'll find Fontographer supports PostScript Type 1 (pfb), PostScript Type 3 (pfa), TrueType (ttf) and its own Fontographer Database (fog) files. While not explicitly listed, it will also work with Multiple Master and Opentype fonts.
Once you've opened a font, a grid showing all the characters will be displayed in a window as shown above. This makes it very easy to access a particular character for editing. By default, the grid displays everything by the character, but this can easily be changed to a number of other views.
By double-clicking on a character in the grid, another window will open showing the details of that character as shown above. In this window you see dots on various parts of the character shape that show each of the curve points. CorelDRAW users know these as nodes. You'll also note that a toolbox appears that has tools for selecting the points, editing them and much more. If any of you were creating a font from scratch, you will also find drawing tools. This is certainly not full of drawing tools like you find in Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or Macromedia's Freehand.
Green guidelines indicate the baseline, cap height and sidebearings (width) of the character. While the sidebearings change from character to character, the baseline and cap height work globally across all characters in the font.
Most people don't think of fonts as over 200 pieces of separate artwork. One of the great benefits of software dedicated to fonts is the ability to change every character at once. A good example would be the ability to change a font's weight. Let's suppose that a particular font didn't have a bold weight available. You can use the change weight feature shown at right to expand every character by the same amount. Total time elapsed is just a few seconds.
Two of the great features added with version 4 of Fontographer are the ability to Auto Space and Auto Kern a font. This can be very tedious work to get the spacing of each character just right. And then deciding which kerning pairs are needed and what amount of kerning to be used can take days or weeks to get just right. These features make it as simple as a menu choice and a few seconds of time. If you then wish to go in and tweak things further, you certainly can.
At some stage of the process, you'll want to supply information about the font. The dialog at left is just one of many where information can be added or changed. This is also where Fontographer shows its age a bit. You'll notice the Encoding is for Windows 95. Other information dialogs let you enter OS/2 specific info. We don't have to worry about that operating system any more.
The last step is to generate fonts. Fontographer can generate in TrueType, PostScript Type 1 and PostScript Type 3 formats. Note that hinting is something that can be done when you generate the fonts. This helps characters look good even on low resolution devices such as screens.
I've found that fonts created by Fontographer work fine for the most part. When there have been problems, it is typically something that I did wrong. About the only downside I can give about the product is that it hasn't been updated for a long time to support some of the newer technologies in the font industry.
This brings us to Fontlab 4. At the time I gave it a look, it was in late beta. At first glance, you'll see lots of similarities to Fontographer. Below is an example of the character chart for an open font. Fontlab is a bit more colorful, but the information is pretty much the same. The addition of a toolbar at the top of the windows does make it a bit easier to use. Opening a character for editing is a double-click away and the window is again very similar.
There is a slight difference in the way metrics can be generated. It wasn't obvious to me at first how to do this since the feature is only found as an icon in the metrics window. Instead of separate options for spacing and kerning, there is just a single generate metrics option. And again you can tweak the settings as much as you like on individual characters or pairs.
FontLab has a much more organized font info dialog box. Each of the options can be accessed via a tree menu as shown below. In addition, the newness of FontLab means that it has settings for things like OpenType fonts that you won't find in Fontographer. And while Fontographer has basic settings for hinting, FontLab goes much deeper.
When it comes time to save a font, a Windows common dialog box is used. If more options are needed, they can be accessed as shown at right. Again the options are cleaner due to the more recent interface and the fact that they don't have to be accessed is nice.
The last comparison is the quality of the fonts generated and it is probably the most difficult aspect to compare. To most people, the output would look identical for the same font exported from both programs. The difference would be the hinting quality on small fonts and the metrics that are auto-generated. Some of these differences could be subjective so I won't try to pick a winner.
Given the support that FontLab has added for the newer technologies, I've got to give it the nod in this comparison. As a fontaholic myself, I'll be curious to see all the great new fonts you create.
Download a free trial version of Fontlab!
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Foster D. Coburn III has written six best-selling books on graphics software and is currently the Webmaster of the Graphics Unleashed Web site.
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CorelDRAW X6 Font List · CorelDRAW X5 Font List · CorelDRAW X4 Font List · The Terms of Adobe Photoshop and Corel PHOTO-PAINT · CorelDRAW X3 Font List · Cropping and Rotating Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · The Magic of Color Styles · CorelDRAW's Find and Replace Wizard · Shorten Your Design Time with Templates · CorelDRAW's Multi-Faceted Eyedropper Tool · CorelDRAW and Special Characters · The Easy Way to Create Calendars in CorelDRAW · The Wide World of Labels in CorelDRAW · Including Variable Data with Print Merge · Resaving, Resizing & Resampling Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Creating Your Own Fonts in CorelDRAW · The Evils of Using JPEG Files · Speeding Up CorelDRAW 11 and Windows XP · Symbols and Imposition · The Easiest Way to Recreate Logos · A Few Guidelines to Follow · Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW · Creating Complex Shapes Easily with CorelDRAW · Identifying the Mystery Font · Two Ways to Create a Split Front Design · Last Word in Font Management · Calibrating Your Printed Colors with a Color Chart · Graphics Computing in 2001 · Hottest R.A.V.E. In Town · Get the Red Out of Eyes · Secrets of Color Management · Dressing Up Your PDF Files · How Adobe Acrobat Can Make Life Simpler · Why You Want PDF in Your Workflow · Converting a Scanned Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Designing 360 Degrees · Customizing Your Interface in CorelDRAW 8.0 · Fitting Text to a Path · Creating Cool Graphs Without a Spreadsheet · From CorelDRAW to Macromedia Flash, A Simple Example · Getting Rid of That Darned White Box · Converting a Bitmap Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Finding Clipart with ROMCAT
Xara Xtreme Pro 5.0
Serif WebPlus X2
Xara Web Designer 5.0
Xara Xtreme Pro 4.1
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional
Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom Digital Camera
Procreate KnockOut 2
Hemera Photo Objects Volume I and II
Wildform SWfx
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 and FontLab 4
Caligari iSpace v1.5
Xara X
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Web Site Design Made Easy
Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000
Swish 1.51
Macromedia Flash 5
Corel KPT 6
Dreamweaver Ultradev
1st Page 2000
Adobe Illustrator 9
Corel KnockOut v1.5
Xara 3D 4
Cool 3D 3
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