Rarely do we find font editor software that is as simple to use as SigMaker is; it’s even rarer to find such a user-friendly font editor, given the complexity of the font creation process. But thanks to its fool-proof user interface, SigMaker certainly takes the cake in terms of ease of use. Unfortunately, this simplicity results in a lower-quality feature set when it comes to font design.

When you launch the software, the main window immediately opens and prompts you to select an installed or custom (downloaded but not installed) font. Another window, which can be moved around the desktop as needed, appears with the six-step workflow. If you need to go back to a certain step at any point in the process, you can click the blue arrows or click on the workflow icon to jump directly to a step. Steps that have been completed are green, while unfinished steps are gray.

Next, you select an image file (either bitmap or vector will work) to upload. This means you must draw your glyphs and scan them in to your computer, or you must create glyphs in an illustrator program like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Illustrator. Once you open the image, you can flip it horizontally and vertically, rotate it or crop it.

Then you are prompted to select the glyph’s position in a list of characters. If the character you want is not displayed, you can choose a blank box. Next, the font creator prompts you to adjust the glyph’s placement. This is essentially a basic metrics editor, as you can decide horizontal placement on a line and adjust the width or overall scale of the glyph compared to others in the font.

Naming options are next. Since SigMaker modifies a font by replacing one glyph at a time, you may want to create a copy of the original font so it isn’t lost. You can name the font and adjust information like copyright, display name and style name (regular, bold or italic). Finally, save your work.

If you want to create an entirely new font with a full set of glyphs, you’ll need to repeat these six steps for each glyph in your font. This can get tedious if you’re working with a few hundred or thousand glyphs, but the six steps are both quick and easy. The entire process is no less tedious than creating a font from scratch and manually adjusting things like kerning, in-depth metrics, hinting and the like, which this font creator does not offer.

You can edit Type 1, TrueType, OpenType and PostScript fonts, though you can’t convert a font from one format to another. You can only replace glyphs in each of these fonts.

We were quite disappointed to note that other than the basic flip, rotate and crop functions, glyph edits are not possible. This font editor does not offer drawing tools to make minor or even major adjustments to glyphs, nor is it capable of batch transformation, blending fonts or composite glyphs.

All that being said, SigMaker is still strong thanks to its incredible ease of use and wide font format compatibility. Many other lower-end font creators rely on bitmap fonts only, which are relatively outdated. And, as we said, the process of editing an existing font or creating an entirely new one is nearly foolproof; though it may be tedious, you’d be hard pressed to actually make an irreversible mistake in the workflow.

In terms of help and support, FontLab gives SigMaker many of the same options as its other software, including an online email form, FAQs, user forum and a bug reporting system. Though it is inconvenient that the manual has to be downloaded separately, it still proves to be a quality manual. At 39 pages for six simple steps, the manual is more than comprehensive, and it even includes a short glossary of terms.