ФонтЛаб - Популарни руски програм за фонтове

[Слатко и Вода]

Ово је само кратак извод из занимљивог чланка, у ПДФ формату, о историјату ФонтЛаба, који се може скинути са ове везе:

 

http://www.font.to/downloads/documents/FLS5MagTypo14.pdf

 

From Font Designer to FontLab Studio

The history of FontLab starts when the history of Soviet Union ends. With the collapse of the communist system in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–90, numerous talents from the former “Soviet Bloc” realized the emerging opportunities. SoftUnion, a young Russian company based in St. Petersburg, was looking for a Western partner who would distribute the software products the company was developing. One of the products was a DOS-based font editing application called Font Designer, developed by a team of programmers led by a young engineer Yuri Yarmola.

Pyrus North America Ltd., founded in 1992 by an American entrepreneur Ted Harrison, became SoftUnion’s worldwide distributor. In 1993–94, the SoftUnion team developed and Pyrus released FontLab 2.0, quickly followed by version 2.5, as well as ScanFont, a specialized autotracer that converted bitmaps into font glyphs. Despite being Windows-only applications, this set of fast and handy PostScript font tools started gaining popularity among type designers and font developers. In 1995 SoftUnion sold the FontLab product rights to Pyrus and focused on the hardware business. Yuri Yarmola and a team of programmers continued to work on font software, and in 1997, Pyrus released a set of new products: a basic font editor called TypeTool, a professional Asian font tool called FontLab Composer (that later became AsiaFont Studio), and a new version of ScanFont.

In 1998, after a complete rewrite, FontLab 3.0 for Windows was released: the firstfonteditorever that allowed native editing of Type 1 and TrueType fonts, with full Unicode support and high-quality hinting. FontLab 3.0 for Mac was released a year later and in 2000, new company Fontlab Ltd. was formed to continue development and distribution of the FontLab products.

Compared to the last version of the application (4.6), FontLab Studio 5 seems much more than a fresh-up. According to Yuri Yarmola, vice president of Fontlab Ltd. and the company’s lead developer, practically every aspect of the application has been revised. “It was the users who shaped the development of the application. More than 90% of the changes in FontLab Studio 5 are based directly on customer feedback,” says Yarmola. The highlights of FontLab Studio 5 include new metrics and kerning editing, improved proofingandprinting,improvedBézierdrawing tools, integrated autotracing (formerly only available in ScanFont, a separate product), improved font merging and blending, in-context glyph design, better OpenType support, better autohinting, improved Python scripting support as well as hundreds of other improvements.

FontLab Studio 5 is a versatile font editor for all sorts of users. The majority of the large font foundries and many smaller font houses use FontLab for designing new typefaces, creating the finalfontproducts,orboth.Linguists,historians, publishers, librarians, scholars, educators, software companies, graphic designers and even Greek Orthodox monasteries use FontLab to create new typefaces and to extend, convert, re-encode and otherwise modify existing fonts. If FontLab Studio is “too much” for you, Fontlab Ltd. has simpler and more affordable products such as the basic font editor TypeTool or the universal font converter TransType.