Adam Twardoch explains the user interface of FontLab, and shows you how to draw and space your first glyphs using the most important tools.
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FontLab 7 is a pro font editor for Mac and Windows. Create, open, modify, draw, space, kern, hint and export desktop, web, color and variable OpenType fonts for any Unicode writing system, from Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, to Arabic, Hebrew and Indic, all the way to Chinese, Japanese, emoji, symbols and icons. FontLab offers a modern platform not just for established type designers and font developers, but also for graphic designers and illustrators who wish to customize existing fonts or create their own type designs.
In this video, Adam Twardoch shows FontLab 7, and demonstrates its user interface. FontLab 7 has a simple welcome screen to open recent fonts or create new ones with a variety of pre-made encodings. FontLab 7 has a Font window to manage the glyphs and a Unicode-based filter to see different sections of Unicode. The software also offers a sidebar to control the size of the font cells, which can be fixed or flexible, and keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out.
Two help resources are available: the Help panel, which provides condensed descriptions of active features, and Quick Help, which gives longer descriptions when hovering over UI elements and hold F1.
The video shows how you can switch between tools using keyboard shortcuts and how the temporary activation of a tool can speed up the editing process. The video shows the Pencil, Contour and rectangle tools, and the use of the Space key to temporarily fill and view the glyph window text. The video shows the Text tool and how you can edit multiple glyphs simultaneously. The video also covers the coordinate system, how to use element references, suggest stems, and auto space in FontLab 7.