Type by Design Back on the Press?

Call me a brute but I fail to see why it's going for 300 bucks on eBay.. If anyone is interested in my copy, feel free to contact me =)

Good book, but still...

Ditto. I've got a copy, but I figure FontLab is the future so that's what I'll invest my training time in. I'll ship out my copy to the anyone for the right price.

it's available for download, chapter by chapter as PDF files here.

don't divebomb his server. looks like a free one.

I've got a series of pdf of it. I did not even know a printed version existed. I always found Fontographer a dumb program but this guide contains general advice and information. I never read it, only some bits here and there.

Since it's an out of print book I don't think these pdf represent a form of "piracy" towards the rightholders. But I've never actually used them, and I would not have bought them in book form.
I'm sure there are other good books on digital type design.

It would be really good to have different book(let)s covering the various aspect of the amazonic forest that's FontLab 4.5.x...

I have the book and I find it very useful. I upgraded to FontLab a few months ago and I must say I haven't managed to face it yet - it looks too damn complicated. I'm still using Fontographer in OS 9.2. Yes, FOG might be a dumb program, but at least the interface is intuitive. When I'm just drawing and doing basic fitting I don't want to have to deal with thousands of palettes and buttons. I just want to pick it up and draw. It's a simple interface for that. I think I'll probably stick with FOG for the initial drawing stange for a while yet...

I think the thing about this book is that there are no alternatives- certainly none that are presented in such a
friendly manner. The FOG manual is not a fun read.

Plus, the general information, the parts that go beyond
the FOG manual, are the truly valuable chapters in Type By Design.

If anyone does know of some alternate titles, I would love to here what they are.

Sean

There is a new Fontographer support site at

http://www.supportandmore.com

featuring among other things The FOG blog and an announcement of the forthcoming book Fontographer: Under the Hood.

On the whole, I think fontlab is pretty intuitive. The toolbars might be scary, but that's just because the program comes from a Windows world.

I mean, Word and Powerpoint have tons of options/toolbars, but we all know how users of those programs have no problem using them without any knowledge (or brains, for some people).

For mr Tam.. a transition to Fontlab shouldn't take you more than a day or two. Join the winning side. ;-)

My client's wife is selling her copy of Moye's book on eBay right now. At my prompting, of course.

Rob, I'm not sure what you use Font Lab for, but I can assure you as a type designer working from Illustrator through high end production, Font Lab is abslutely NOT intuitive.

Windows users or not, I have written Yuri many times about this concern and received the same reply "It's not a priority in our development cycle at this time"

I'm not sure I understand that logic - It's an application that for all intents and purposes can do FAR more that Fontographer FAR better if you can figure out how to operate it efficiently enough for your production model.

Our production model is very fast with Fontographer but I have no ability to customize keyboard commands (ala Command + K) to open the metrics window nor do I have the ability to cleanly kern metrics because the letters are BELOW the editable metrics data and I can't quickly tab from kern to kern as I can in FOG.

Beyond that, I haven't heard that the eps interpolation issue has been resolved, so why would I want to import my cleanly drawn glyphs from Illustrator to Font Lab only to have strange points added to them?

It's not truly a useful application if it cannot be used and Fontographer bashing aside, there are many things that it still does far better than Font Lab. I'd be happy to donate my time freely to help them develop a better GUI but there is no interest on Font Labs part as per my repeated e-mail attempts.

Until then I have no choice but to dabble in Font Lab while I do my REAL work in Fontographer (much like switching to OS X)

Stuart :D

Seems that the debate fog:Fl follow the Xpress:Indesign one!

With type design workshop experience, with people with no real experience in either of the two, just Illustrator, I found more easy to explain how manipulate FL curves and points that fog points by the past. The students learn more fast and clear FL drawing interface.

I used for 10 years fog, but really happy to use the nice smoothing forms of FL on Mac X erveryday.

About Fog, Just try to buy it on Macromedia website, it is not listed on the product menus on the home page. Need to go to software page to finally found it somewhere at the end of the page. Just dead. Saddly for this good 1994 product.

Here's an idea: maybe Typographica can host a wish-list discussion about what us present, former and future type designers would like a type design program to do. (Maybe this also includes the more modest idea of an Illustrator plug-in.)

And then perhaps, if a coherent, detailed description of a list of requirements can be drawn up, the participants might go on from there to a search for a cheap but good programming team that could be commissioned to produce software that did everything on the list.

You might also run a discussion about how and how much each to contribute to the fund to pay for this, not to mention how to progress legally and commercially, once the software is produced and useable. You would have a one-off custom piece of software for your own use, or you'd have something that, on the one hand would be a commercial alternative to compete with the $540 FontLab (and very little else, quite frankly), or it could even be an open source project (provided the GUI is kept under very strict control).

There is always a flow of new programmers coming into the employment market, and although this is a very speculative proposal, I think I could envisage a situation where perhaps $5000 was raised and a two person team of programmers made a little bit of a name and reputation for themselves with a breakout project like this.

i've been working out my first full family done in fontlab, and it does have several features which are much more powerful than fontographer ever was (such as the ability to control opentype characteristics fairly specifically). it also incorporates the notions of kerning and metrics assistance as fog did, in almost exactly the same way. the manual is a starting point for learning; i've had many nights over the past few months in which i bang my head against ridiculous little undocumented quirks and interface usability problems. hinting is far superior to fontographer. but support is pretty nonexistent, and they insist upon releasing updaters with no clue as to what's actually being changed in the program—a practice which gets screamed about consistently (and ignored) at the fontlab messageboards.

as for working between illustrator and fontlab, i finally figured that one out (i had to; i'd created an entire family in illustrator and then began learning fontlab) and posted a workaround here. after working with the program for a few months, i can now use it pretty fluidly.

Nobody's mentioned FontStudio - is this software dead as far as people here are concerned?

My path is clear.
(ok, I like being cryptic, but those in the know will remember this discussion )

I'm fluent in FontLab and will even be teaching it next year at the college where I work. However, if Jim ever gets another version of Fog on the market, I would switch back in a second.

Andrew Fall: Good you mentioned FontStudio. It's not just because I've used it for over ten years. I started working on a Mac (never used a DTP program before) in a typesetting bureau in 1989, with PageMaker 3, FreeHand 2.02 and Photoshop 1 (!)
When I started using these programs, I was amazed at how the Mac software in general was intuitive. Having used PCs a little (not at home, I bought my first computer in 1991 and it was a Mac IIsi) I found incredibly easy to get into these programs.
PageMaker was really intuitive.
From that time onwards, of all the imaginable programs I've used I've found just two program totally user unfriendly: QuarkXpress and Fontographer.
I was never able to use Fontographer until my friend Fabrizio Schiavi explained me a bit the basics. But it remained too dumb for me. Maybe it was just because FontStudio was so friendly.
I never understood why people found such affinity between the drawing tools of FreeHand and Fontographer. FreeHand has been my daily bread for over 12 years and, although lacking the precision of the grid of a font software, was always intuitive. At least up to version 8.

Anyway, FontStudio is long time dead. I've written to Letraset a few times in the past. If the program was more popular, they would have upgraded it, but it wasn't. Fontographer, besides his unfriendly (at least to me) interface, was way too reliable to lose any of its audience. FontStudio was buggy. Wonderful but buggy. In the end, I bought Fontographer to generate final files.
As far as I know, FontStudio could be in the hands of Adobe, but no one has the slightest intention to revive it.
The same thing seems to be happening to Fontographer, since Macromedia started to devote all its energies to web-design even FreeHand has become far less friendly and lacking typographic features which have always been its strength.
They stopped upgrading Fontographer, and besides the efforts of Letterror with their Robofog (based on Fontographer 3.5, anyway), the program did not have upgrades in recent years.

Then it came FontLab. It's not so "windows". It's just a labyrinth.
It took more than a pair of days for me to understand the basics.
I found it very friendly in its drawing environment, which is far more closer to FontStudio's than Fontographer's, but in the end the manuals Pyrus provides are still not enough, and the program is still a rainforest...

It has bugs but they won't crash your OS (at least not under Os9 which I'm using at home). The main, big problem is the lack of printing features and the still immature metrics environment, pretty close to the Fontographer one.

Fix these two things and add a metrics environment like the one in FontStudio 2 and we will have a great basis. Then people will be free to dig into OpenType, Unicode pages and multilingual typography.

For now I consider it fantastic but I have not yet tested its realiability in generating the various font formats.

The drawing tools are just amazing. I have not been able to draw with Fontstudio (or Fontographer) anymore, after I have learned what FontLab allows.

Claudio--I think what people mean by the "affinity" between Freehand and Fontographer is that they were both created by the same people at AltSys. So the Bézier drawing tool (at least in the earliest versions of Freehand) worked exactly the same. In the same way (but not for the same reason) FontStudio's Bézier drawing tool is very similar to Illustrator's, and it seems to have been intentional. FontLab's drawing tools seem more related to CAD programs, for better and worse.

My Type by Design copy is up on eBay for your auction spectating pleasure.

Just for sh*ts and giggles...
current list price for this book on amazon is now $1,300.

Checkit.

It's cool to see what this thread has become!

After some comments, I came up with an idea and if enough momentum gets behind it I will most likely make it a post later in the week.

Check it out here

It's a trend. Another one.

Maybe the cost will go down if everyone starts selling.

Hey, where is my zed? Is this thing trying to trick me?

Mark wrote:
"Claudio--I think what people mean by the "affinity" between Freehand and Fontographer is that they were both created by the same people at AltSys. So the Bézier drawing tool (at least in the earliest versions of Freehand) worked exactly the same."

Not at all. I know all four programs and I can assure you that the drwaing tools of a design/illustrator program are hardly similar to the ones of a type design program, for a simple reason: in a type design program, you are forced to the "coarseness" of the em square grid, which usually was 1000 for type 1 and 2048 for Truetype.

For this reason I have avoided almost at the beginnning to use Illustrator or Freehand (at least for "clean" types).
The drawing precision of FontStudio was unique, because it worked within these restrictions making you aware of them.
FontLab has at least two modes: if you switch off the antialiasing you will realize better the restrictions of the grid and you will have a behavior closer to the one in the old FontStudio. The antialiasing is very useful anyway. Often is good to switch back and forth from one mode to the other.

I can't seem to find an affinity with CAD programs, but I'm not familiar with them, anyway. FontLab is just overloaded with menus, windows, buttons et al. A cleaner interface would be a lot more effective.

We've enetered the realm of collecting. With even a mere $300 you could buy many old type books of great value. I bought "The Book of Oz Cooper" on ebay for something around $40. It has a torn opening page, but it's a white page...

Of course the Fontographer book provides notion on digital environment and bezier curves that go beyond mere explanations of the program, but this remains pretty absurd.

I find simply ridiculous this kind of collecting.
It's the same thing happened to the Marvel Comic book Incredible Hulk #181, with the first appearance of Wolverine.
It's now the most valued Bronze Age comic book and this is simply ridiculous. The story is good (as were all Hulk stories at the time) but not surely for the presence of Wolverine.

Besides, Mark, if I recall correctly, FontStudio was an Ares product, like the excellent FontMonger and FontChameleon, and was just licensed by Letraset.
Nothing to do with Adobe. I've heard that rumor on Adobe having bought it but it's probably not true. Besides they will never develop a type design software, I fear.

the drawing tools of a design/illustrator program are hardly similar to the ones of a type design program

What I meant was that the way the pen tool worked and the way the Bézier curves were displayed and manipulated were the same in Fontographer and Freehand. I understand and agree with what you're saying about the working environment being different.

What I meant about Font Studio was that its pen tool was more like the one in Illustrator than the one in Fontographer. So if you were used to working in Illustrator, Font Studio's pen tool felt more natural than Fontographer's. I didn't mean to imply that Adobe was involved in the development of Font Studio.

I understand your point about the advantage of working within the restrictions of the em unit grid in a font. But there is at least one drawback to that approach.

If you have a rectangle that is 10 em units by 7 em units and scale it to 20%, you will get a 2 x 1 em unit square. This is because 1.4 em units is not allowed and gets rounded to 1. If you later change your mind and scale it back up by 500%, you will have a 10 x 5 rectangle, not a 10 x 7 rectangle. Every time you do this scale something down, you loose some accuracy due to rounding. The more transformations, the rounding errors occur.

In FOG the same thing happens, but since it keeps track of control point coordinates in thousandths of an em unit, the amount of error is a thousand times smaller.

Whether this is a serious problem or not depends on how you work. But there are advantages to not working in em-unit space, especially during the design stage.

AUCTION UPDATE
My Type by Design auction is at $122.50 with 2 days left. John Butler's client's wife's copy went for $152 earlier this week. Two others went for over $100 in the last 3 days.

I hope your happy with your blood money scoles :D

Finally got my copy $116 later . . .

:D

Egads. I have two copies of Moye's book. If anyone's interested, you're more than welcome to take it for a spin for the cost of shipping, as long as it's in decent condition when you return it.

I’m planning to donate my copy to the TypeCon 2003 auction. So, if any of you are still looking for a copy (it really is a worthwhile book when you’re just starting out), then come give your money to a good cause.

— K.

Imagine my surprise when I read this morning on the Typographica site that the copyright of F:TBD had reverted to me. I obviously missed the communication from Wiley that informed me of this interesting fact. Just another reason to keep up to date by visiting Typographica on a regular basis.

By the way, Adobe bought Ares and, I believe, hired some of its developers. Certainly they have more than enough resources to turn out a type design application. I am told that there is no interest in doing this because there is, from a profit viewpoint, not a big enough market.

Stuart - I would really appreciate a copy, in one form or another, of the letter you received from Wiley. Before I start revising the book I want to make quite sure of my ground.

Thanks.

Stephen

Stuart (again!)

Sorry to be tiresome, but I wanted to thank you for the kind words. Just the encouragement I need to start on the second edition and corrections to the first.

Thanks again.

Stephen

Welcome Mr. Moye!
Stephen #2 beams.

There is a copy of Fontographer: Type By Design on eBay now for a FAR more reasonable price. Less than $100, free shipping.

Has any one reviewed Font Creator at:
http://www.high-logic.com/fcp.html

I have never used a font program before?
I'm wondering if this very low priced
software is really up to doing hard work!

The web page above makes it look very
impressive.

Thanks, Don

As an amateur, I use FCP for my design work and it suits my needs very well, but it does not have all the drawing functionality of Fontographer or Font Lab; there are no drawing tools besides creating contours and manipulating the points of your quadratic bezier curves. It also has no tools for programming hints or including BDF bitmaps for screen display at small sizes. That said, Erwin Dennison purposefully preserves tables found in your font if you have other tools for these tasks, and will only delete hinting if you change a particular character.

The greatest strength of FCP is really the forums http://forum.high-logic.com where you can discuss the program with other users and the programmer himself. I personally requested in the forums and had a new way of creating composite characters in a new release within a week's span.