New 700 reasons to love FontLab 8: What’s new in FontLab 8¶
New With FontLab 8, we’ve revised and modernized every aspect of our powerful, versatile font editor. Discover the new dark UI theme, adjustable Stroke and Brush sketching, polished drawing and editing, non-destructive transformations with Delta, visual and numeric measurement, glyph building with Skin and variable components, spacing and kerning with mouse and trackpad, batch font export and Actions sets, revamped color and gradients, plus support for
.glyphs3, FontForge, COLRv1, and Python 3.New In FontLab 8.4, we’ve gone even further!
Just starting? Switching from another font editor? New Quickly access smarter Help, and tool-relevant operations via context menus. New Improved widgets give you familiar, clean and easy access to the essential properties of a glyph, component or selection. Each contour, element or layer is just a hover glance away. Name your glyphs & export as feature-rich OpenType!
Busy drawing? New Unit grid helps you find your bearings in high zoom. Snapping is instant or relaxed, as you wish. Your italic angle gets full respect as you center, align or add New named anchors. New Use components in Mask as visual reference. New Detach serifs from stems & make them re-usable. New Quickly turn contour selections into new components or elements. New Scale paths, elements and components to the same width or height.
New Mac? New Enjoy massive up to 2× speedups.
CJK designer? New Build your CJK fonts with visually controlled variable components and Unicode Variation Selector sequences.
FontLab expert? New Match Moves shifts one point on all masters. Your glyph can repeat in multiple places, and ǵét́ś á (truly variable) ḿáŕḱ preview. You can open and export sources in Git-friendly
.glyphspackageformat. Export post-processing can re-organize the files, run QA checks, build extra files, and push to Git. New Visually adjust variable components made from any glyph. New Build complex glyphs with better Skin filter.
Explore & prepare
Relax your eyes with the new dark or refined light interface theme. Group panels into a vertical infinite, scrollable panel dock, and intuitively navigate between the panels.
Adjust numeric values with sliders and calculations. Boost your productivity with up to 8× improved performance.
Draft & draw
Draw calligraphic letterforms with new Power Stroke or improved Power Brush. Modulate thickness visually with new Thickness tool.
Draw fluently with Pen, Rapid, Soft Pencil and Soft Brush toolbox sub-tools. Draw polygons and stars with Rectangle tool.
Edit & refine
Make slanted selections, keep selections as you switch masters, and store them in Selections panel. Use toolbox for hands-free Power Nudge, handle Nudge, Slide, harmonized dragging and Lever precision dragging, and for easier curve cleanup with Eraser.
Adjust curve tension numerically. Align and collapse points. Reverse contours with Fill tool. Sort contours. Paste to replace selection, replace segment with corner. Fine-tune individual ink traps and smart corners.
Consistency & precision
Study the numeric values of your stem widths, counters, segment lengths, curve tensions and corner angles with Auto-meter, or hold G to temporarily view these in Guides tool along with quick measurement and master relations.
View relative node offsets. Snap to continuation lines, perpendicular lines and centerlines. See coordinates for key nodes only. Edit visual TrueType Hinting like never before.
Build & assemble
Convert selections to components or elements. Add decoration and attach shapes to nodes or segments with updated Glue filter, or with .glyphs-compatible Skin filter in segment, dash, corner and cap modes.
Use clipping groups to mask out areas. Use text shapes to re-use scaled words or phrases from your font in existing glyphs.
Metrics & kerning
Use your mouse to adjust metrics and kerning with high-precision Lever dragging. Hide or reduce the visibility of spacing controls for distraction-free spacing and kerning.
Auto-space and auto-kern with one click or tap.
Families & variation
Quickly make variable fonts from static fonts. Define custom per-glyph variation axes. Re-use live interpolated instances to build glyphs with smart variable components.
Set start points and reverse contours in all masters. Make contours compatible with improved Matchmaker. Group layers visually.
Test & adjust
Print waterfalls or interpolations from Preview panel. Batch-run selected FontAudit fixes in glyphs and masters. Create, save and run action sets that combine multiple actions.
Batch-adjust stem widths in a master. Adjust by variation to replace contours with an instance. Add shadows, extrusions, engravings and repeated outlines. Perform complex non-destructive transformations with new Delta filter.
Color
Fill elements with gradients or solid colors. Copy-paste color fill and stroke between glyphs. Import drawings with gradients. Open and export better OpenType+SVG and new OpenType+COLRv1 fonts.
Export an automatic dark-mode color palette. Overlay multiple layers into color fonts.
Glyphs & fonts
Quickly create new glyphs with common suffixes. Rename a glyph along with suffixed alternates. Clean up classes when removing glyphs.
Copy-paste classes between fonts or masters. Exclude glyphs from export into final formats.
Formats
Batch-export many fonts into many formats. Open and export the .glyphs format in version 2 or 3. Open FontForge SFD files, bitmap BDF fonts and multi-flavor color fonts.
Use improved VFJ, UFO, VF support. Export WOFF2 color web fonts.
Scripts & integrations
Write and use Python 3 scripts. Seamlessly interchange with other font editing apps like Glyphs or RoboFont.
Perform global transformations with the powerful TypeRig library. Create fonts for the entire Unicode 14 standard.
- Compared to the initial 8.0.0 release, the FontLab 8.2.0 update brings 250 new or improved features and fixes. See release notes for detailed info about the recent changes.
- Compared to FontLab 7, FontLab 8.2 has over 700 improvements: See above for a detailed description of all changes in 12 major areas of the app.
- Compared to FontLab VI, FontLab 8.2 has over 1,200 improvements. See What’s new since FontLab VI for a list of highlights.
- Check what type designers say about FontLab 8.
- Discover our new tutorials.