FontLab 8

Explore & Prepare

Work with blazing speed with even most complex contours thanks to FontLab’s optimized architecture.

Customize FontLab’s interface to your needs, and easily navigate it with the intuitive Quick Help system: hover and hold F1.

Draft & Draw

Draw outline-based glyphs using the Brush, Pencil, Rapid, Pen, Ellipse / Oval, Rectangle / Polygon / Star tools, in a purely-integer or fractional coordinate space.

Draw calligraphic letterforms with live, adjustable Power Stroke and Power Brush tools. Modulate thickness visually with new Thickness tool. Assign and expand strokes.

Paste and import PDF, EPS & SVG vector artwork with monochrome, color or gradient fills and strokes, as well as scanned character sets or color bitmap glyphs. Turn them into monochrome fonts via customizable autotracing, or into color OpenType fonts.

Edit & Refine

Natively edit cubic PostScript Bézier curves and quadratic TrueType curves, including overlapping open paths, using the Contour, Knife, Scissors and Fill tools.

Drag some nodes and have other nodes or handles follow intelligently with Power Nudge and handle Nudge. Drag without zooming in for small adjustments with Lever precision dragging.

Convert between the curve types with adjustable precision.

Consistency & Precision

Use upright and slanted grids, flexible guidelines, snapping suggestions and live measurement tools for consistent and precise vector drawing.

Dynamically snap to nodes, angles, stem distances, continuation lines, perpendicular lines and centerlines as you draw.

See lengths, angles, curve tension, stem thickness, whitespace distance — measured numerically and visually as you draw.

Work on a purely integer grid, or scale, rotate and slant losslessly thanks to FontLab’s fractional drawing precision and live integer rounding, apply the rounding to bake in the integers.

Build & Assemble

Build glyphs from Components that point to other glyphs, or from Element References that cross-reference each other and can be edited anywhere they appear.

Decompose a component and unlink a reference to make local changes only.

Use Auto layers to build predefined glyphs and keep them automatically updated.

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Metrics & Kerning

Space entire phrases and kern according to planned pair lists. Apply tracking, modify widths, sidebearings and kerning globally or for selected glyphs. Edit kerning for right-to-left scripts like Arabic or Hebrew.

Automatically or manually build kerning classes and link metrics between glyphs using complex expressions. Automatically calculate metrics and kerning, or use autokerning suggestions as you kern manually.

Kern between classes and glyphs in a UFO- and OpenType-compatible way, with exceptions. Audit kerning to find combinations that produce visual conflicts.

Families & Variation

Blend, interpolate and extrapolate fonts, create intermediate weights and styles, build extensive font families and variable OpenType PS & TT fonts with intermediate font and glyph masters, conditional glyph substitutions, and automatic masters matching for point-compatible outlines.

Preview interpolation live with sliders, variations map and play/pause buttons.

Test & Adjust

Use Preview panel to view current and custom text in current, all or visible masters, waterfalls, composites and anchor groups.

Print a glyph map from the Font window; words, phrases and texts from the Glyph window; waterfalls and masters from the Preview panel.

Preview Windows screen rendering with built-in genuine Microsoft ClearType, even on the Mac.

Preview complex-script shaping and OpenType features with the genuine HarfBuzz world-ready shaper.

Find and fix outline problems with FontAudit. Automatically clean up and optimize outline drawings, balance segments and modify curve tension, harmonize G2 curvature, create and remove overlapping paths, apply non-destructive ink traps and rounded corners.

Run automatic action sets to make changes to multiple glyphs and layers, to change weight, create contour versions, apply effects to outline and bitmap glyphs.

Color

Paste and import PDF & SVG vector artwork with color or gradient fills and strokes, and color images in a variety of formats.

Apply solid colors or gradients to fill and stroke, edit gradients visually.

Space and kern vector-based or bitmap-based color glyphs, automatically build OpenType features.

Overlay monochrome fonts or layers into multi-color fonts.

Export into OpenType+SVG, +COLRv0/v1, +sbix and +CBDT color font formats.