The Null Device

For the best part of a decade, the application for anyone who wanted to make their own fonts (PostScript or TrueType) was Fontographer. Then, sometime in 1997, Macromedia (who had recently acquired it) abandoned it. They kept selling it, but no new development took place, and advances in font technology (such as, say, Unicode and OpenType) passed it by. Even worse, the last version turned out to not work at all under MacOS X, presumably due to the programmers having used some sort of undocumented shortcut that the Classic environment couldn't handle.

Anyway, now Fontlab has acquired Fontographer from Macromedia Adobe (who have no font editing tools of their own on offer and no intention to change this; which is rather surprising from the inventors of PostScript), to integrate into their font-editing product. It'll take the mid-range niche, between basic font editing program TypeTool and the high-end FontLab package.

(via gths) ¶ fontographer osx software typography 0

A few days ago, on a whim, I decided to see if my old Windows version of Fontographer would run under Wine under Linux. Imagine my surprise when I found that (with a bit of hacking) it runs quite usably. (Some obscure dialogs lock it up, but that's a lot better than the Mac version runs under OSX's Classic mode; which is saying a lot.)

Consequently, I spent some time making another cheap and nasty geometric font, this time based on a type of alphanumeric display used in places like airports and trains. Then I got carried away, did a version based on a malfunctioning display (one that was on the train I caught to Reading on my way to Aberystwyth a few weeks ago, actually), and one showing random pixels, and so on, until I ended up with a five-font set. Which now appears on my rather underdesigned font page. Well, that and an even more dodgy-looking bitmap conversion I did a few years ago.

(This is the font appearing in the title graphic; incidentally, the photograph in the graphic is the view of the countryside out of the window of the train with the malfunctioning display.)

Anyway, enjoy my modest typographical efforts. If you find them useful, please consider making a donation to the EFF or the Free Software Foundation.

¶ fontographer personal typography 1