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Fontographer 5

Classic clutter-free font editor
With Fontographer, it’s easy to design new typefaces and to customize existing fonts, and the result will be high-quality fonts that can work reliably across different operating systems. Fontographer 5.2 is extremely easy to use but packs a lot of technical sophistication under the hood. So you can create professional fonts without being a technical expert.
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“Fontographer is for digital graphic designers who need to make or edit fonts in the course of their work. (...) My personal advice? Learn FontLab. If you are serious at all about learning to design fonts, you will need the power of FontLab. It is necessary for excellence in letterspacing, kerning, OpenType features, and more. My books will show you how to use it. Once you learn FontLab, you’ll be glad you did.”
“Fontographer 5 is the best-in-class font editor, the flagship application that has launched a thousand faces (and more). Not only does it excel as a powerful and flexible font editor, it enables the serious typographer to customize their existing fonts, add new glyphs as needed; critically adjust kerning and spacing; convert old fonts to a new format; and more.”
“For nearly any font editing task you’d want to accomplish—from simple tweaks to creating your own from scratch—Fontographer is still, after 21 years, the quickest and most intuitive way to go.”
“Every design studio should have Fontographer 5 for its wealth of font creation, editing, fixing, and conversion abilities.”
school  If you’re a student, teacher or an academic institution, visit our for Education page for info on edu discounts!

Intuitive glyph drawing

Draw and edit Bézier glyphs clutter-free

The Glyph Window has a rich set of easy-to-use yet powerful Bézier tools

Originally developed by the same team as the drawing program Freehand, Fontographer (or “FOG”) was the first software product on the Mac ever to include Bézier drawing tools, and is still famous for its clean, robust and easy-to-use user interface.

Draw curves with the classic Bézier Pen tool or use the Curve, Corner, Tangent, Arc tools to build your outline step-by-step. Draw geometric shapes with the Rectangle or Polygon tools (including stars and rounded corners), and with the Ellipse tool. Draw calligraphic strokes with the pressure-sensitive Calligraphy Pen.

Add nodes and slice through segments with Knife. Remove nodes manually with Merge Points and automatically with Clean Up Paths while keeping the shapes of the curves. Turn on Auto Curvature to keep nodes extra-smooth.

Scale, Rotate, Slant losslessly thanks to the fractional precision, Align Points to Grid to snap the points to preview the final font outlines in integer coordinates.

Draw on the Outline layer. Place curves and bitmaps into the Template layer for reference. Turn template bitmaps into outlines with precise Auto Trace. Measure distances with the Measurement tool, and use arbitrary vector shapes as guides in the Guidelines layer.

Make the glyphs lighter or bolder with Change Weight. Create intermediate weights with Blend Fonts.

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In FontLab 8, you can draw and edit many glyphs at once with our next-generation drawing tools: a live calligraphic Power Brush, an easy Rapid drawing tool, a live pathfinding Fill tool. Edit your outlines faster with Power Nudge, slide node, G2 Genius nodes, revolutionary Tunni lines, live rounded corners.

Easy spacing and kerning

Space and kern your font manually or automatically

The Metrics Window lets you set the width, sidebearings and kerning

Each glyph is a design on an advance width. When you type text using a font, each glyph appears and the text cursor is shifted by this glyph’s advance width. Then, the 2nd glyph is placed at the text cursor. If a kerning pair is defined between two glyphs, the 2nd glyph’s placement is shifted by the kerning pair value. Your glyph contours are drawn inside the advance width (but may also overhang outside the width). The distances between the contours and the advance width on each side of the glyph are called sidebearings.

Use Auto Space to automatically set the metrics (widths and sidebearings) of all or some glyphs. Use the Metrics Window to manually tweak the glyph metrics. Use Metrics Assistance to copy metrics to other glyphs.

Use Auto Kern to automatically generate kerning pairs for glyph pairs that need placement correction. Turn on Kerning in the Metrics Window or use Edit Kerning to manually edit kerning pairs. Use Kerning Assistance to set equivalent pairs for glyph groups/classes, for example accented characters.

Turn on Preferences > General > Asian CJK font editing and turn on Vertical in a Metrics Window to edit the top and bottom sidebearings.

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FontLab 8 lets you space, kern, draw and edit glyphs in its unified windows. Build complex spacing relationships with metrics links, view kerning classes as you kern, apply OT features to space & kern alternates. Dock windows into tabs or float them across monitors, all in gorgeous Retina / High DPI quality.

Multilingual character sets

Unicode and OpenType support

The Font Window lets you add and find glyphs for any writing systems

Edit fonts with up to 32,000 glyphs from any writing system, with any Unicode codepoint. Create accented characters using components. Use built-in and custom encoding filters to view your glyph set. Add alternate glyphs, small caps, ligatures or glyphs from other writing systems. Add OpenType Layout features: use the Adobe FEA syntax to write the feature definitions in an external text editor, and include them in the exported font.

“My hopes for new development have just been realized with the release of Fontographer 5.0 in 2010 — all the simplicity has been retained with a range of new features.”
— Michael Everson
type designer, linguist and Unicode expert, evertype.com
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In FontLab 8, you can create accented letters faster using anchors and auto layers. You can add small caps, ligatures, alternate glyphs and glyphs for complex scripts such as Arabic using OpenType Layout tables.

Maximize design, minimize technobabble

Fontographer is technically sophisticated so you don’t need to be

Control just the essential settings and let Fontographer do the rest

In Fontographer 5, you only need to set some basic technical parameters to generate a font. The app will figure out the rest, and export the font using our industry-proved high-end FontLab engine. Fontographer automatically optimizes the font rendering in small sizes using sophisticated autohinting, or lets you manually define hints.

Generate PostScript-flavored OpenType PS (OTF) fonts and TrueType-flavored OpenType TT (TTF) fonts. Also generate Type 1 and Mac Classic font formats. Export glyphs as Adobe Illustrator 8 EPS (.ai + .eps). Save Fontographer FOG files or export FontLab VFB files, and open them in FontLab VI or FontLab Studio 5 for professional-quality technical post-production.

Create monochrome bitmap fonts from scratch or from an outline font, and edit them, in multiple sizes, export BDF bitmap fonts, and open them in BitFonter for professional post-production, or import them into FontLab Studio 5 for embedding into TrueType SBIT fonts.

“The engineers at FontLab have produced what is without question the best upgrade ever to the venerable Fontographer program. The update of the interface retains the familiar Fontographer feel while providing a more modern look, and there are quite a number of improvements and new features. It’s obvious there has been a lot of thought, time and effort put into this upgrade, and I am very grateful for all that work.
My favorite new and improved features are the character antialiasing, OpenType and Unicode support, the ability to work with FontLab Studio .vfb file formats and the new hinting capabilities. Just these few things alone are going to make my workflow so much better, and they are but a small part of the long list of improvements.
I highly recommend Fontographer 5 to anyone who is considering upgrading from earlier versions or is considering learning how to make fonts. Experienced users will love it, and I feel that even a new user who is skilled with other drawing programs would quickly adapt to using it.”
— George Thomas
type designer, Majus
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FontLab 8 lets you create OpenType fonts with superb screen quality thanks to advanced autohinting and manual hinting. You can use interpolation to export entire font families and variable fonts. In FontLab 8, you can also design emoji and multicolor alphabets and export them as color fonts.

Download & Learn

Download Fontographer 5 demo

The demo version of Fontographer has save and export limitations.
Try FontLab VI as a future-proof alternative!

Learn Fontographer 5

Download full version

If you have a Fontographer 5 serial number, download the installer for the most recent version. 

Fontographer Summary

Make & EDIT Outline Fonts
  • Drawing tools: Pen, Calligraphy Pen, Rectangle, Polygon, Ellipse, Arc, Curve/Corner/Tangent
  • Editing tools: Knife, Measurement, lossless (fractional-grid) Scale, Rotate, Slant, Mirror
  • Components for accented and composite characters
  • Layers: Outline, Template (vector and bitmap background), Guidelines (use arbitrary vector shapes as guides), Hints
  • Actions: Clean Up Paths, Remove Overlap, Auto Trace, Change Weight, Blend Fonts
Make & Edit Bitmap Fonts
  • Create monochrome bitmap fonts from scratch or from an outline font, and edit them, in multiple sizes
  • Export BDF bitmap fonts, and open them in BitFonter for professional post-production, or import them into FontLab Studio 5 for embedding into TrueType SBIT fonts
METRICS & OPENTYPE
  • Advance width, left and right sidebearings. Advance height, top and bottom sidebearings for CJK fonts. Metrics assistance to copy metrics to other characters.
  • Horizontal and vertical (CJK) pair kerning. Kerning assistance to set equivalent pairs in accented characters.
  • Automatic generation metrics and kerning
  • Write OpenType feature code in an external text editor using the Adobe FEA syntax and include them in the exported font.
PRODUCTION & EXTENSIONS
  • Edit fonts with up to 32,000 glyphs
  • Simple production settings`
  • Full support for Unicode and custom encoding files
  • Autohint fonts for high-quality screen appearance
  • Generate the font as Fontographer FOG file or FontLab VFB file, and open it in FontLab VI or FontLab Studio 5 for professional post-production
SYSTEM & FORMATS
  • Fontographer 5.2.3 for Windows
    Works on Windows 10, and on Windows XP SP2+ or newer, 32-bit or 64-bit.
  • Fontographer 5.2.4 for Mac
    Works on macOS 10.14 Mojave, and on Mac OS X 10.6.8 or newer.
    Important Does not and will not work on macOS 10.15 Catalina, macOS 11 Big Sur or newer.
  • Import OpenType PS (.otf), Win TrueType / OpenType TT (.ttf), TrueType Collections (.ttc), Type 1, Mac classic suitcases*, Multiple Master, FontLab VFB (.vfb), Adobe Illustrator 8 EPS (.ai, .eps), TIFF, BMP.
  • Generate OpenType PS (.otf), Win TrueType / OpenType TT (.ttf), Type 1, Mac classic suitcases *, FontLab VFB (.vfb), monochrome bitmap fonts (.bdf), Adobe Illustrator 8 EPS (.ai + .eps).
  • *) Only available in the macOS version of the application
  • Limitations on Demo Version
    Export and save limitations. Minor issues on Mac OS X 10.10–10.12 (not present in the full version).