Quick, what was the first Bézier (vector) drawing program for Mac computers? You can be forgiven for guessing Adobe Illustrator but in fact it's Fontographer that holds this title—first launched by Altsys in 1985, later sold as an Aldus product, then finally winding up as part of the Macromedia line. Alas, no further Mac updates were forthcoming from Macromedia after version 4.1.4, released in 1996. Purchased by FontLab in 2006, version 4.7 was subsequently released for Mac, providing long-overdue bug fixes and some minor updates, such as support for the Euro character, updated encodings, and copy-paste compatibility with current versions of Illustrator and Freehand. And now we have version 5, for both Mac and (yes!) Windows.

Since FontLab provides a variety of type creation and editing tools, some explanation is valuable about where Fontographer fits in. According to Ted Harrison, President of FontLab, “With our TypeTool product we have a font editor for beginners, hobbyists and students. FontLab Studio and AsiaFont Studio are our high-end products with a certain degree of technical complexity, aimed at professional type designers. Fontographer fills the gap between those products—a font editor for graphic designers and desktop publishers, powerful enough for real-world typography but without all the bells and whistles of our high-end products.”

So what's new in version 5? FontLab claims "This release is specifically designed for busy desktop publishers who need fast, efficient solutions to font problems." Not to worry, the popular drawing tools have been retained but long-standing feature requests such as a larger zoom level and outline antialiasing have been added. Setting technical font parameters such as font naming or linespacing in Fontographer used to be cumbersome so these have been redesigned to make them as easy to use as the rest of the product. Fontographer 5 can now read and generate OpenType fonts in both PostScript (.otf) and TrueType (.ttf) flavors. It also now provides greatly improved Unicode compatibility.

Also new is a redesigned and updated Font Info dialog for editing the relevant technical parameters for all font formats; a Spotlight-like glyph search feature that allows users to quickly highlight or select glyphs based on the Unicode codepoint, glyph name or Unicode character name; support for manual editing of Type 1 hints; high screen font quality due to an integrated Adobe PostScript autohinter and the FontLab TrueType autohinter; and quite a bit more. In fact, FontLab claims that "This is the release that the font software community has been waiting for more than a decade!" and it's hard to argue with that.

Fontographer 5 can be purchased for $399 on the FontLab site, with a demo version available for download.