In the early 2000s, an ex-Netscape programmer George Williams started developing FontForge (originally under a different name), the first open source GUI font editor. In the late 1990s, Just van Rossum wrote fontTools/TTX, a pure-Python open source parsing and manipulation toolkit for OpenType fonts.

In 2001, FontLab 4.0 added support for Python, and a few years later the RoboFog team created a Python library called RoboFab which allowed running scripts written for RoboFog to be run within FontLab.Īll these apps were commercial and ran mostly on Mac OS or Windows. The app was acquired by Microsoft and extended by Beat Stamm to become VTT, the visual TrueType hinting tool, which is available for free. Among other things, he created TypeMan, an app for TrueType hinting.

One of the engineers who originally created the TrueType font format at Apple, and the inventor of the TrueType hinting language, Sampo Kaasila, started his own company Type Solutions, later acquired by Bitstream and ultimately by Monotype. It developed the FontLab font editor and a few other tools (TypeTool, ScanFont, TransType).Īlso in the early 1990s, Peter van Blokland, Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum created RoboFog, an extended version of Fontographer 3.5 that included support for Python, a scripting language created by Just’s brother Guido van Rossum. Portions of the software ended up as part of Flash, Freehand was abandoned but Fontographer was sold to FontLab.Īround 1990, FontLab was formed as a U.S.-Russian collaboration. The development of Fontographer stalled for a decade. Altsys later extended Fontographer into Freehand, a full-blown vector graphic editor, then was acquired by Macromedia and later by Adobe. In 1985, Altsys, a Texas-based company, developed Fontographer, the first Macintosh app that allowed drawing with Bézier curves, and the first PostScript Type 1 font editor. There some very capable apps in the package though the user interface of some may be a bit dated. The successor of URW, URW++ together with Dutch Type Library continued development of Ikarus based-tools under the DTL FontMaster brand. Peter van Blokland ported it to the Mac as Ikarus M. In 1975, the Hamburg-based company URW published Ikarus, the first computerized system for designing outline-based fonts. Adam Twardoch offered a brief history of type tools on the fonttools mailing list in September 2017, which with permission is added to this book and can be freely edited and expanded.

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