Fontographer back from the dead? 10 May 2005
11 comments Latest by Joe
Here’s at least one bit of good news to arise from the recently announced merger of Adobe and Macromedia: the latter company’s once popular Fontographer application for the creation of new typefaces has been sold to Fontlab. The new owner pledges: “Our team is committed to continuing the development of a brand-new version of [Fontographer],” which is a welcome statement to its long-suffering fans. Which is to say that, based on the product’s extensive history of receiving neglectful treatment, you could be forgiven for taking a wait and see approach before getting too excited for Fontographer’s arrival in the 21st Century. Still, it’s nice to be optimistic.
11 comments (comments are closed)
Anders Markstr�m 11 May 05
Guess it just means that Adobe will be releasing their internally used typeface creation tool to the public.
Robert Cortez 11 May 05
Man, Fontographer used to be the joint back in the day. ‘Member those sound effects? SHHIICKK! OOOHRRRAAYUMM! Yeah.
Oh and I’m still waiting for Adobe to update ATM Deluxe for OS X too. One of these days…
Christopher Fahey 11 May 05
Wow! Just out of curiosity, what have font designers been using in the decade or so since Fontographer was last touched by human developers hands? When I last checked the Fontographer morgue, which was about 6 years ago, Fontographer was still the only game in town.
Dan Boland 11 May 05
My coworkers all use Suitcase. And it’s interesting that Adobe indeed hasn’t updated ATM for OS X, considering that Suitcase is totally incompatible with CS2 (just as it was for CS1 when it was released).
Christopher Fahey 11 May 05
Suitcase lets you design fonts?
Dan Boland 11 May 05
D’oh! It would help if I actually read what I’m reading…
tre 11 May 05
aside from proprietory software and old fashioned sketching, i believe the aforementioned fontlab by fontlab has been the de facto standard after the abondonment of fontographer.
pk 11 May 05
couple of things:
1) considering that Suitcase is totally incompatible with CS2
completely untrue. i’m using it with CS2 now as successfully as i used it with CS1
2) a lot of people still actually have OS9 partitions just so they can still use fontographer on a mac, or a crap win box lying around. i did for the longest time, because i didn’t want to lose all my old .fog files for my families (i have a lot of stuff available thru thirstype that i have to do maintenance on).
fontlab actually creates much better quality fonts, and with more flexibility. from what i gather, fontographer is gonna be revived as a mid-level fontmaking tool for more inexperienced designers—or those of us who don’t need to use opentypem features.
Dan Boland 12 May 05
pk: This is straight from the horse’s mouth. We had the same problems with Suitcase and CS1. Maybe you’re just lucky.
Kim 17 May 05
what have font designers been using in the decade or so since Fontographer was last touched by human developers hands?
FontLab’s other products.