FontLab Studio is certainly the cream of the crop when it comes to font editor software. It quickly set the standard by which we judged all other font creator applications in terms of font creating, editing and converting features and tools. While the navigation does take a bit of getting used to, the software certainly isn’t overly difficult to use. And the company’s impressive help and support tools include a massive 900+ page user guide and an impressive array of video and written tutorials. It’s no wonder FontLab Studio is our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner.
FontLab Studio, the namesake of parent company FontLab Ltd, has the largest set of available features in our review. Basically, if you can think of it, FontLab Studio already has it. So simple font creator features, like a preview window, bitmap and vector file import and basic drawing tools like pencil, eraser and ruler are all no-brainers.
More advanced drawing tools, like a polygon, circle or rectangle shape maker, round and calligraphic brushes and multiple brush styles, are hard to find in other font editors – but we found them here. And of course, most of the drawing tools in FontLab Studio are vector-based, not bitmap-based, for a higher-quality result.
For even further glyph customization, you can apply one of many font effects. These are achieved through drawing tools, OpenType specifications, action scripts or a combination of the three. You can achieve a bold, outline or college (double outline) appearance, or create an italic with the skew action. The shift, scale, mirror and rotate actions also come in handy. We especially like the ability to add a drop shadow, 3D extrusion or rotation or gradient. And that’s just a few of the many effects that this font editor offers.
Arabic and Hebrew characters are easy to create, thanks to the OpenType features and the ability to create text that reads right-to-left, rather than the standard left-to-right that most Romance and Germanic languages use. The composite glyphs feature also helps with these styles of fonts, but it does wonders for Latin-, Greek- and Cyrillic-based fonts as well.
FontLab Studio offers by far the simplest approach to batch transformations among any of the font generator software we reviewed. Simply turn on the “batch mode” in FontLab Studio, and you’re ready to make mass edits with ease. Want to blend two fonts into one new design? FontLab Studio makes it easy to make your own font based on ones that already exist, whether you’re blending two together or just tweaking a single font. (Though when you’re tweaking a font or fonts that were created by someone else, make sure you’re not violating copyright. Check the font’s info for copyright and ownership data.)
Guidelines can be found everywhere, from the individual glyph editor to the kerning and metrics screen, and they are quite useful for making sure your glyphs are uniformly sized and spaced. For spacing, you can choose automatic metrics or kerning, or you can make individual tweaks to both aspects. And if you’re worried about your font displaying incorrectly at lower resolutions, just use the hinting functions to solve your problems. If you are less tech-savvy, you can turn on automatic hinting so you won’t have to define parameters yourself.
Want to make your own font from your (or someone else’s) handwriting? Just import scanned images of the glyphs and trace them with the bitmap background tool to create an outline font with ease.
It may seem as though editing and conversion features are less important than font design features in any given font maker. But if just a few key tools are missing from this category, the software’s usefulness plummets drastically. Fortunately, FontLab Studio earned a perfect score for our rating criteria in this category, thanks to its wide range of compatible file formats and great list of features.
Of course, many editing features can be found in the font creation category; after all, they are often the same tools used in different ways. But this font editor goes above and beyond in that it allows for a wide range of conversion possibilities. It will open any type of font, including bitmaps, and it can save a font as any type of outline format, including Adobe Illustrator-compatible EPS files. Though it can’t save as a bitmap font, this is hardly a major drawback; bitmaps as actual font files are largely outdated. As we said, FontLab Studio will open bitmaps and bitmap fonts, allowing you to save them as more current outline-style fonts.
We love the “test font” feature. This allows you to preview the font as it will appear once it’s been installed on your computer. It only works for OpenType TT or PS fonts, but since OpenType fonts are highly customizable and current, they’re likely what you’ll be working with anyway. You can, of course, edit individual glyphs in a font, but you can also apply edits to an entire font family. This is incredibly useful when creating a bold or italic version of a font that doesn’t already have those formats. It’s also useful for applying OpenType features, hinting or metrics to an entire font at once, rather than going in to each of the hundreds or thousands of glyphs and applying these effects individually.
While no font creator software we reviewed could be considered “easy to use” by traditional standards, we found that FontLab Studio was quite easy to use when compared to other font makers. There is a learning curve when it comes to navigation, but this is eased by the fact that tools and features appear precisely where one would expect them to be in the drop-down menus. The menus themselves are well labeled, which helps even further.
We like the customizability of the various windows and panels within the main screen. You can detach certain panels from their windows and move them around as your workflow demands for maximum convenience. Not all of the tool buttons are labeled, but the icons are familiar to anyone who has used Microsoft’s Paint or any other bitmap or vector illustration application.
What we found most impressive about FontLab Studio’s help and support features was its user manual. The massive PDF document weighs in at just over 913 pages, and it’s chock-full of information regarding the font editor itself. In addition, each chapter begins with a handy explanation of what each term means. For example, the Editing Metrics chapter first explains what metrics and kerning are. The level of detail is simply phenomenal, and the pages themselves are broken down into well-organized chapters.
If you’re having trouble finding a certain topic, you can always search the file, or you can check the index at the end of the document. The only real downside is that you have to download and access the manual separately; you can’t open it from the Help file menu at the top of the application window.
Other options are no less impressive. You can contact the support team via an online email form, and they’re quite responsive. There are also FAQs and a user forum online, as well as a place to report bugs in the software (if there are any in the first place). We love the tutorials page as well. It has numerous video tutorials and text- and graphic-based instructions to help you get started. You'll also find several external links related to font design as a whole that aren’t specific to this particular font creator.
In all, FontLab Studio certainly is worth the wear on your wallet. Though you can’t create as many glyphs as in other font editor applications, the effects and changes you can apply to the glyphs you create are, simply put, phenomenal. When added to a comparatively easy-to-use interface and a stellar array of help and support options, FontLab Studio definitely takes the cake.
