Font creation tools

Type design
1

What tools do you use for font creation? I am partial to FontLab Studio 5, but don’t know much other then that.

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2

I’ve used FontLab Studio 5 to make all the fonts currently in my library. Though I own licenses to FontLab 7, Glyphs, and RoboFont—because I like to support makers of font tools—I never got very far with them because I didn’t find their spacing / text-preview windows to be especially ergonomic for the way I like to work. Thus, over the last couple years, I’ve been working with Antonio Cavedoni on a new GUI font editor called Archetype. I am progressively transitioning all my type-design work into Archetype, and plan to sunset my FL5 toolchain over the coming 12 months.

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3

Is it archetypeapp.com or something else?

4

No, that’s a different (and possibly abandoned?) tool. My Archetype font editor is not publicly available.

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5

Whenever I need to make a font for one of my constructed scripts, I use FontForge, but I’m an amateur so it might not work well for you.

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6

I bet I used FontForge about 11 years ago to create a cryptic font for making cyphers but the details escape me. Maybe it was something else.

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7

Is the Archetype tool you’re referring to intended to be in-house use only?

I learned a lot using FLS5; versions 6, 7, and now 8 seem to be focused on typeface design instead of production-facing tasks. I spent a lot of time turning custom typefaces into fonts for various brands for high-volume product customization.

Are there tools that are especially good at kerning tasks?

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8

For now, I’m the only person using it. Though I’m sure other FL5 fans would appreciate it, I’m not sure how I would go about commercializing it. I think it would have to be held out as a companion to Fontlab 8 rather than a standalone tool. It is very focused around my own type-design priorities (e.g., spacing) and completely omits things I don’t care about (e.g., interpolation, variable fonts).

I reuse many kerning pairs between weights and liberally use kerning classes. Between the two, I’ve never found it to be as much of a chore as some claim. Some time ago, I worked on an auto-kerning algorithm, which maybe I’ll return to. I’m a lot more interested in auto-generating glyphs than kerning, however.

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