Fontographer Lives!

About sixteen years ago I bought a program called Fontographer and fell in love. I was captivated by the ease with which I could either create a typeface from scratch or turn scans of favorite typefaces into something I could use on my computer. At about the same time I started to keep a kind of journal, an aide memoire, wherein I could jot down techniques and tricks that I found to be useful.

Five years later, with much encouragement from Earl Allen at Altsys and Richard Beatty, MIS:Press published Fontographer: Type by Design. Looking back from this point in time at subsequent events, I think that Henry Holt (parent company of MIS:Press) must have been fairly well along in discussions leading to the purchase of MIS:Press by IDG. Little was done to promote the book and I was left largely on my own to publicize it. IDG promptly declared the book out-of-print and destroyed all remaining copies — without contacting me in any way as far as I know. Harumph. The book then went to Hungry Minds and finally to John Wiley, who gave the copyright back to me.

Meanwhile, Altsys was bought by Macromedia. Macromedia clearly wanted as little as possible to do with Fontographer. Eventually the program was effectively orphaned — still listed in their catalog, but unsupported, without even an update to get it to work reliably in Classic on Mac OS X.

And the world of fonts was changing at a dizzying pace. Multiple master fonts went the way of the dodo bird. OpenType emerged as an important font format. Unicode — need I say more? Fontographer and the book were in danger of becoming mere relics of a bygone era, a simpler time.

The response to the book — even though it was in print for a relatively short period of time — has always been very gratifying. People still seem to find it useful: not entirely surprising as there are people who still use Fontographer. I still get the occasional inquiry about a new edition or version of the book. Up to now, I have only been able to smile wanly and thank them for their interest, my enthusiasm for such a project considerably dampened by contemplating what a happily-solvent publisher might say about the prospects of publishing a book about a piece of dead software. Yeah … that’ll happen.

Well, the good news is that Fontographer has found a new home — Fontlab, Ltd. Fontlab has planned an update for this year and a new version for next year. This is a terrific boon to all those who grew accustomed to Fontographer’s wonderful drawing interface. It also means that I now have a book to revise! This will be all the more interesting in that Fontographer will take its place in a palette of type tools offered by Fontlab, which will yield new, surprising and useful synergies — all of which I am delighted to be able to explore.

To those who have been so very supportive, my thanks — but the best is yet to come.

See also: Discussion at Typophile: here and here.