NOTATIO

Hello all.
What would you recommend as a font editor except FontForge and those expensive Fontographer...?

I just upgraded to Yosemite, so something compatible.

I would like to use primarily for music symbol tweaking, mappings, outlining...

Thank you. O

The big ones, aside from FontForge, are Glyphs (www.glyphsapp.com), FontLab (www.fontlab.com), and RoboFont (www.robofont.com). None of these are cheap, I'm afraid. We're using Glyphs and FontLab here (Glyphs for our UI font, and FontLab for our music fonts, mostly because I'm used to FontLab after using it for many years, but Glyphs is great too).

dspreadbury wrote:The big ones, aside from FontForge, are Glyphs (http://www.glyphsapp.com), FontLab (http://www.fontlab.com), and RoboFont (http://www.robofont.com). None of these are cheap, I'm afraid. We're using Glyphs and FontLab here (Glyphs for our UI font, and FontLab for our music fonts, mostly because I'm used to FontLab after using it for many years, but Glyphs is great too).

Daniel,

jut curious, how does Glyphs compare to FontLab in your opinion, and why do you use this specifically for the UI font instead of FontLab?

Thank you Daniel!

Do you know if the Mini version would suffice for what I could need?

https://www.glyphsapp.com/glyphs-mini

OCTO wrote:Thank you Daniel!

Do you know if the Mini version would suffice for what I could need?

https://www.glyphsapp.com/glyphs-mini

OCTO,

It's a bit hard to say from the feature list and not knowing your needs exactly. However, it seems to me that Glyphs Mini may be inadequate if you plan on creating fonts with advanced SMuFL and OpenType feature support. Also, there may be certain automatic processes only available in the full version, but it's not clear. The good thing is that you can upgrade to the full version if you need to.

Anyway, don't you have Fontographer already? What about upgrading to FontLab (I think that is possible)? It's still the industry standard, as far as I know.

Yes, I had Fontographer, but it is demo, plus that I have to switch to FF to continue editing. And now I have reinstalled the system, upgraded to OS X 10.10.5. and I am thinking about something new...

OCTO wrote:Yes, I had Fontographer, but it is demo, plus that I have to switch to FF to continue editing. And now I have reinstalled the system, upgraded to OS X 10.10.5. and I am thinking about something new...

I see.

From what I can tell so far, Glyphs mini only has support for the Basic latin character set. In a music font context, this means that you can only design fonts with a similar scope to those of current Finale fonts. SMuFL, Lilypond, and probably even Sibelius is off limits.

Based on what I've read, Glyphs is a highly polished font editor. It aparently lacks some of FontLabs more advanced capabilities, but surpasses it in Multiple Master support and automation (which can be both good and bad, depending on how you work).

My initial impression is that FontLab resembles Finale in it's flexibility and feature set, while Glyphs seems a bit more like Sibelius, with a more streamlined interface and higher degree of automation. Glyphs is a much newer software (FontLab's current version 5 was released as far back as 2005), so my guess is that it will give you a better experience right now. However, version 6 of Fontlab is not far off, and it looks really amazing (http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-vi/).

You could also look into BirdFont. Semi-free. https://birdfont.org/

Interesting, Knut! I have applied for their FontLab VI Public Preview. Do you use that one?

DatOrganistTho wrote:You could also look into BirdFont. Semi-free. https://birdfont.org/

Definitely to be tested! Do You use it?