Boost your design productivity
You can draw smooth, consistent glyphs, autotrace bitmaps, create overlaps, simplify paths, equalize stems, scale outlines while keeping stroke thickness. You can draw in fractional or integer coordinates, see view numeric and visual measurements, find & fix contour imperfections.

Next-generation drawing
Creating Bézier curves is no longer “mastery or mystery.”

Seriously better Béziers
We love curves so much that we are making them better.

Complete color support
In FontLab 7, everything is color-enabled. Draw multi-color contours, bring in color outlines, improved SVGs and bitmap images, overlay layered fonts and create emoji or chromatic fonts for all Color OpenType-enabled platforms: Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CC 2018+, macOS, Windows 8+, iOS, Android and modern web browsers.

Integrated ScanFont
You’ve made your drawings somewhere else? No problem. Copy-paste glyph outlines or color vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator, FontLab Studio, or other vector drawing or font apps, import SVG drawings, bitmap images and new PDF graphics. Arrange them on the Sketchboard, optionally turn bitmaps into smooth vector graphics using autotrace, then automatically assign the letterforms to glyphs to create a fully working font in a few minutes. No need for a separate ScanFont app!

Sketchboard
Our Sketchboard is a a virtual desk or canvas that allows you to draw and experiment outside of any glyph. It’s great for collecting sketches, separating artwork into glyph images, or just drawing logos and symbols using all of FontLab’s juicy Bézier magic. You can also arrange text frames showing different fonts you’re working on, and export the contents into a PDF or SVG for proofing.

Pixel-savvy
Drag-drop or copy-paste pixel images in most formats, with mono, grayscale, full color and transparency support. Improved Split and autotrace or place the images into the img layer for reference to draw over them. Rotate and scale imported graphics, crop, blur, remove noise and background.

For design space explorers
A font family consists of fonts that have different locations on one or more design space Axes, such as width, weight, slant or optical size. To create interpolated instances or a variable OpenType (TT or new CFF2) font from one or more Font masters, use Font Info to add the axes and assign axis locations for all font masters within your FontLab font.

In an instance
Easily plan your Instances for an extensive font family or a variable font. With axis instances, define per-axis interpolation locations and style phrases, and FontLab will automatically build a matrix of all instances for all axes, with correct Style names and Style groups.

From Multiple Master to Variations
Thanks to our Variations engine based on MutatorMath, your Masters no longer need to stand in the MM corners, but can be placed freely within the design space. Unlimited axes, intermediate font masters, glyph masters that affect only certain glyphs give you complete freedom in designing interpolable font families and variable OpenType fonts.

Intelligent interpolation
To create intermediate designs via interpolation, you need all your glyph masters to have the same number and geometric structure of contours and nodes. FontLab can help you automatically match your masters by sorting contours, relocating start points and correcting path direction.

A match made in 7... masters
Whether you have two, four, seven or a dozen masters, the improved Matchmaker tool helps you make their point structure compatible for interpolation. Matchmaker works on Sections, which are sequences of line or curve segments.

Distraction-free spacing
Perform metrics and improved kerning editing in a multi-line Metrics Window, with an adjustable, distraction-free UI and intuitive keyboard shortcuts. Step through your phrases with the Pairs & Phrases panel, or dive into details using slanted sidebearings and the Measurement line.

Linked & adaptive metrics
Want the O sidebearing to always be 60% of H? Link metrics and set up complex spacing relationships with our live math expressions engine. Bind the sidebearings and they will remain constant—even when you change the outline. New Easily copy expressions between masters.

Kerning that just works
Class kerning is now compatible with UFO and OpenType, without key glyphs, and conflict-free. Preview the Kerning Classes clouds as you kern and compare your decisions with live autokerning suggestions. New Find visual kerning collisions with Audit Kerning.

Powerful anchors
Position Anchors manually or link their positions to other anchors or guides with math expressions. FontLab will display all matching diacritical marks in the Anchor Cloud, and will use your anchors to generate composite glyphs and the mark/mkmk OpenType features.

Components, References, and Auto layers
Use Components to build accented letters or ligatures from other glyphs — the composite glyphs you create will inherit outlines, guides and anchors from the component sources. Or turn on Auto layer, and the metrics and component positions in the composite glyph layer will always stay up-to-date.

Flag and tag glyphs
Sort glyphs by the Color Flags (marks), and organize your glyphs with Tags: assign multiple labels to your glyphs, then assign the same tags to font guidelines, stems and zones, and they’ll only appear in the tagged glyphs.

Glyph and character search
Just type. We can find glyphs by glyph name, Unicode character name, script, codepage, encoding, range — you name it. FontLab also has improved friendly alternatives to standard glyph names built in. Use friendly names for development but export industry-standard fonts, with no added effort. New Batch-rename glyphs with a few clicks.

Full Unicode & OpenType
Test your OpenType features with the built-in HarfBuzz OpenType Layout engine with complete complex-script support. Search for glyphs based on Unicode character names and Unicode scripts.

TrueType Hinting
We’ve completely revamped FontLab’s beloved visual TrueType Hinting (TTH) engine, and added TTFAutohint as an alternative engine. FontLab 7 includes a true Microsoft ClearType preview (even on the Mac version), has a streamlined user interface, allows you to attach visual TTH commands to PostScript outlines and overlapping paths, and has built-in functionality to copy TTH commands from one font to another, or from one glyph in a font to a similar one.

Express export with Profiles
Trying to duplicate a bunch of preference settings to output a specific font could be painful. In FontLab, we have introduced Profiles for font generation. Each profile is a group of settings for generating output fonts in a particular format. FontLab 7 has a set of improved profiles for all our standard output formats, and you can easily create new profiles to meet your particular needs.

Embracing your workflow
Type designers use various tools and workflows. FontLab 7 does not lock you into a proprietary file format. Got fonts in another format? FontLab opens it: OpenType (TT, PS, Variable TT, new Variable PS, SVG, sbix, CBDT, COLR, TTC), Web (WOFF2, WOFF, EOT), FontLab VFB, Fontographer, improved Glyphs, improved DesignSpace+UFO, PostScript Type 1, TrueType, Ikarus, even old Mac fonts on Windows (in a Zip container)! Instead of reinventing the wheel, FontLab 7 uses the industry’s best solutions: Adobe FDK for OpenType, Microsoft ClearType, TTFAutohint, MutatorMath, fontTools with varLib, HarfBuzz, ICU, Python (APIs compatible with FontLab Studio and RoboFab), the KLTF kerning optimizer and a SpeedPunk-style curvature view.