Programmes which handle vector graphics -

a personal decision: 5 of 5

Well, I recognised that the decision was made ...

I was very clear that I wanted to make web-sites with Macromedia's Dreamweaver rather than Adobe's GoLive, and when I wrote this I knew of nothing like Macromedia's Fontographer: but otherwise, I feel very clearly confirmed that I'm buying products from the company which is right for me now anyway :-)

And that's rather good, the day after I've ordered a whole package of creative stuff from Adobe, which will bring me up to a very empowering, and properly legal, instrumentarium, consisting of

Photoshop (pixel-image editing) Illustrator (vector-image editing) Acrobat (editing PDF's) LiveMotion (animation for Flash, QuickTime and GIFs)

PageMaker (everyday page layout) InDesign (smooth page layout) Premiere (editing video for QuickTime) AfterEffects (animation effects) Media Cleaner (compression for small file sizes)

But - guess what?! - two weeks later I had thought through my whole situation once again, and found I really needed to be in touch with Macromedia's products too: and that since their complete Studio hardly costs more than the upgrade to Dreamweaver I will anyway have to have sooner or later, I pushed the boat out and used just a bit more of my pensions savings for that too ...

And now the big question - will they also stretch to get the alternatives to Fontographer???!!! I'm thinking specially of the new(ish) FontLab series, which look as if they offer an up-to-date interface and functions, while Fontographer hasn't seen a new version for six years, and really feels like a System 7 programme from pre-PowerMac days - but you only get a stingy three days to test the FontLab demos, and there are eight products in the range ...

And when is something going to allow me to make OpenType fonts on the Mac, I wonder?