Fontographer Wiki

	Fontographer wiki
Category Graphic Apps Font Tools

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Fontographer

Developed by	FontLab Ltd.
Latest release	4.1.5/Windows, 4.7.3/Mac / 2006-3-31; 1359 days ago
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Type	Font editor
License	Proprietary EULA
Website	Official page

Fontographer (sometimes abbreviated FOG), is a software application used to create digital fonts, available for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh platforms. It was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd.

1 Fontastic
2 Fontographer
3 FontLab Ltd. acquires rights to Fontographer
4 References

[edit] Fontastic

The first foray by Altsys into commercial font editing software was a bitmap font editor called Fontastic, released in the mid-1980s for the Apple Macintosh. The program, developed by Altsys founder Jim von Ehr, was able to edit the native bitmap font format of the Mac. It introduced many of the interface elements that would carry over into Fontographer.

[edit] Fontographer

Fontographer, developed by von Ehr for the Mac and released in the fall of 1986 — before Adobe Illustrator — was the first commercially available Bézier curve editing software for a personal computer. ^[1] High quality fonts in the PostScript format could be developed for a fraction of the cost of all other existing methods (URW’s Ikarus required systems costing over $100,000^[2]), leading to what has been called “the democratization of type design” ^[3]^[4]^[5]: for the first time in history, numerous self-taught type designers without substantial capital investment produced fonts for professional use. In January 1995, Altsys was acquired by Macromedia. A new version of Fontographer was included in the Macromedia Graphics Suite, which helped its wider adoption. Although development of the font editor was frozen since 1998, when version 4.1 was released, many font and graphics designers continued to use it. The only serious competitor at the time, FontLab, was generally considered more difficult to use. RoboFog was a version of Fontographer 3.5 with an embedded Python interpreter, developed by Just van Rossum, Petr van Blokland and Erik van Blokland.

[edit] FontLab Ltd. acquires rights to Fontographer

In May 2005, FontLab Ltd. announced that they had licensed distribution rights from Macromedia, and resumed development. They are currently selling Fontographer along with their other products. In December 2005 FontLab shipped a new version of Fontographer for Mac OS, running natively on OS X and featuring numerous bug fixes. They have since exercised their option to buy all rights to Fontographer, so it is now fully owned by FontLab Ltd.