As we reviewed TypeTool, we found that there was very little it lacked when compared to other font editors. Of course, no application is perfect, and TypeTool does come with a few minor drawbacks. But its strong font design feature set and outstanding conversion and editing functions, coupled with its relative ease of use, make this font creator a great choice for intermediate and professional use. And if you’re not quite up to the professional level yet, FontLab’s help and support features are always there to give you a hand. These features led us to give TypeTool the TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award.
One of the first things we noticed is TypeTool’s incredible glyph support capabilities. With the ability to create and edit more than 65,500 glyphs, this font editor had one of the highest supported glyph numbers among the products we reviewed. This means that your font design options are nearly limitless; you can create a font as large as you want, even in languages that have far more glyphs than traditional English.
Arabic, for example, has different glyphs for any given character depending on where it appears in a word or sentence. With lower-quality font editor software, you risk running out of space in your glyph set. But with TypeTool, this will never be a concern. In addition, TypeTool supports font design for languages that read from right to left, making it easier than ever to create an Arabic or Hebrew font.
You can import vector and bitmap images with this font generator, though there is no tracing tool to help you turn your bitmaps into font outlines. This makes the process a bit more tedious if you’re turning your handwriting into a font, but it certainly isn’t impossible.
For minute glyph edits, there are a variety of drawing and vector paint tools available. This font editor has the typical brush, pen, eraser and knife tools, but it also includes some advanced tools as well. These help you insert nodes (points along a path in the glyph’s outline), remove overlapping contours and alter contours by merging, intersecting, breaking or joining them. There is a magic wand selection tool, and though we couldn’t find an actual button on the toolbar, we were able to access it by pressing the 4 key on our keyboard. There are also tools to let you add corners, curves, tangents, rectangles and ellipses to your glyphs. Guidelines within the glyph editor help you make sure your glyphs are uniformly sized.
Batch transformation is limited to shift, rotate, scale, skew and flip functions (accessed via the Transformation panel or via the Actions menu), and is achieved by holding down the Shift or Control keys and clicking on the glyphs you want to edit. Using the skew function in this manner makes it very easy to create an italic version of a font that does not automatically include italics. You can also easily create composite glyphs with this font creator.
You can manually adjust hinting for an individual glyph, or you can apply automatic hinting to an entire font. Likewise, you can adjust kerning manually or use the automatic settings to do it for you. Glyph metrics are edited in a separate window in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get display, making the process much simpler than if you had to manually type in values.
TypeTool scored perfectly in this category, though its capabilities are not without some catches. For example, the test font feature only works with OpenType-based fonts, and while it can save files as EPS, they’re not Adobe-Illustrator specific EPS files. Overall though, the editing features in this font editor are quite satisfactory.
You can easily convert between most font formats, since TypeTool opens any format and can save to most of them. The one format this font editor really doesn’t save to is bitmap, though that format is rapidly becoming outdated so this is less of a problem than you might think.
You can make edits to individual glyphs, entire fonts or to a font’s family or style name, giving you complete control over your fonts. Just make sure you’re not making these changes to a font that is protected by copyright, as this would violate the rights of the designers who created it.
We found this font generator to be relatively easy to use, given its inherent complexity. The main application screen contains several different panels and windows to help with workflow. For example, all the glyphs of a font are displayed in one window, the glyph editor is displayed in another and font metrics are in a third. All the windows can be opened, closed and resized as needed, so only the information you need is displayed.
In addition, the drawing tools, vector paint tools and transformation functions are all displayed in moveable panels. Though the buttons aren’t labeled, hovering your mouse over a button displays its name for easy reference. We found that we didn’t need to hover our mouse over very many buttons, as the icons were generally recognizable.
This font creator’s help and support options are pretty phenomenal. You can contact FontLab via an online email form if you have any questions that aren’t answered in the FAQs, user forum, manual or tutorials. There’s also a separate bug reporting form if you notice that the software seems to have a coding error.
The tutorials are in video format, and there are links to some written tutorials on font design that are hosted on external websites. As for the help manual, it was inconveniently accessible via a separate download; you can’t access it through the software’s Help menu. But once we downloaded the, we felt that it was worth the extra effort. At nearly 400 pages, it is incredibly detailed, comprehensive and helpful.
Despite a few very minor drawbacks, we found TypeTool to be a wonderful font editor for professionals. The tools and functions it does offer are quite satisfactory in scope and relatively advanced, making it easy to customize your font down to the tiniest details. Intermediate users may require extra help before they feel confident with the software, but the wide array of available support options will keep you from feeling lost. With a bit of reading and some time, even tech-savvy beginners may find this font creator useful.
