ave you ever had that feeling, constant and overwhelming, that someone has been somewhere before you and thought about everything you might need, and seen that it's there and that it works. Your mother maybe did it sometimes, if you're lucky, your lover too maybe. When I experience it, it makes me cry. There are a few software programmes that have done it: ClarisWorks 4, InDesign and Final Cut Pro; and now the suite of FontLab and ScanFont have done it too.

Fontographer itself lay undeveloped for nearly ten years until the FontLab people bought it up and revamped it to work under Mac OS X, and if it does what you want that's great.

In the meantime Yuri Yarmola and his extraordinary team in St. Petersburg had produced a suite of alternatives under the flagship name 'FontLab', now marketed under the leadership of Ted Harrison and with guru Adam Twardoch answering for support and marketing and contact with the world and vision and goodness-knows what else.

I first went to explore what they'd done with Fontographer, and concluded that I was as well off using my old version under the Mac Classic OS: but then my attention was caught by the alternatives - FontLab, TypeTool and ScanFont - and after a week found that I couldn't live without them, they're a reason for waking up in the morning, they're so empowering that I get new ideas for fonts all the time and simply couldn't wait to get my hands on them.

• truly cross-platform, truly international
• auto-complete font info
• FontAudit and other built-in fail-safe gadgets warn you about all kinds of problems you might not have thought about, like open contours on 'generate font'
• extraordinary support - quick, effective
• autotrace in ScanFont+FontLab = 350 times quicker than Fontographer: Fontographer takes 7 steps per glyph x [say] 100 glyphs; ScanFont = 2 steps all told
• 'the little grey cells', not quite what Poirot means, but the way the font window is already filled in with light grey glyphs as a kind of background template, so you can easily see what's done and what's yet to do
• some have said it's excessively technical, but I didn't react like that: sure, it has a vast number of tools, functions, commands, and variables: but Yuri & Co have made them as neatly manageable as they could be, and the interface generally is as friendly and you could want
• some have experienced a steep learning curve; I didn't, and would say that FontLab people have done a *lot* more to make their programmes, accessible than Macromedia did with Fontographer; there are tutorial movies, which are nearly as good as someone showing you how they use it, and there's a friendly 'Learn FontLab Fast' which gets you started in FontLab, TypeTool and ScanFont for only $25, 160 pages, clear and simple, you can read it for pure enjoyment in your favourite place, it tells you everything you need to get going and any more-detailed points you can check in the manual on-screen.
• 900 page manual; on-screen PDF or print on demand
• metrics window, SO many possibilities ;-)
• auto settings produce a usable result, even if tweaking is needed to get it really right: one designer and calligrapher I work with commented specially on how exciting, creative, empowering it was that I could straight away produce a prototype of a font from his sketches, so he could see where he needed to refine and polish for production
• the demo versions do everything for as long as you want, but only save half the glyphs in a database file and put a disfiguring logo in half the characters; not as friendly as a one-month fully functioning trial, but a whole lot better than what was offered before, something that was enabled for three days (!), which put it outside the realms of reality for me.
• font info: wonderful that they've thought in such detail about the user's practical needs that, alongside the field where you can enter URLs for a designer site and a vendor site, they've given buttons to launch each site so you can check that the address you've given is right and works.

Of course, this is the real world, you don't love everything your mother or your lover does: but these few minor 'cons' feel OK because it's evident that the FontLab team is genuinely open to suggestions for making things better, and constantly working on doing just that.

• it's hard to find your way in a 920-page manual on screen; you can get an 'on-demand' printed copy for $70: for anyone who's concerned that it would be out of date with the next version of the programme, CEO Ted Harrison writes
  • "- very little goes out of date. Virtually everything that was in FontLab 4 stayed in FontLab 4.5, 4.6 and 5. So the only real differences in the manuals is that we keep adding stuff."
• movies out of date and Win-only
• FontAudit: we need the functions 'fix everything for selected glyph's, 'fix everything for this font'

Other reviewers have commented on the price tags, and I can share that reaction: but then, you *are* paying for quality. And getting it. There are consumer versions at prices which don't involve making a budget and saving up; unfortunately, although I'm don't make real money from my media work, as a creative artist I find the various consumer-level alternatives of the (iBook, iMac, iMovie, Express, iPhoto etc.) simply frustrating: that's a stumper. But for anyone who qualifies for educational pricing, it all becomes affordable.

Calligrapher and designer Richard Bradley writes:

I really do rejoice in your very good experiences with the Font Software folk.

Could you please share with them how apparently easy it was for us to produce Ricks Relaxed Italic?

1. I sat and wrote for an hour or so.
2. Scanned then sent to you.
3. Received and worked on for about 90 mins in FontLab or similar by yourself.
4. Then having a sound model for a working font ready to use and allowing more refining and polishing for production.
5. Surely not possible without calligrapher, font creator, and excellent working software all working together.

I find that quite exciting and creative to be able just to write and then move on so relatively easily to type. It would be good for them to know this as we have already done it between us!