Fontographer guru Jim Gallagher calls the development a "momentous one" for all font enthusiasts.Font enthusiasts are celebrating the return of Fontographer as FontLab announced its licensing of the entire Fontographer line from San Francisco-based Macromedia.
"Fontographer is still a very strong brand name, and we want it to be the font editor of choice in the desktop publishing and graphic community," said Ted Harrison, president of FontLab Ltd., a company based in Panama City, Republic of Panama.
With the purchase, FontLab said it will assume support for Fontographer version 4.1+ from Macromedia Inc. and has tapped Jim Gallagher, who has nurtured and supported Fontographer for the past 10 years, to now continue to provide tech support and help with testing and upgrading.
Jim Gallagher's industry moniker is "Der FontMeister," and he is often considered to be the official Fontographer guru.
He is also the founder of Supportandmore.com, which supports all that is Fontographer.
Gallagher is also working on a book that reveals the secrets of Fontographer.
Gallagher termed the return of Fontographer "a momentous one for the long-standing line."
Gallagher said Fontographer's origination some 20 years ago revolutionized the layout process and changed the industry as a whole with the birth of vector drawing.
"Before, you had people laying out the college newspaper with Elmer's glue and Scotch tape; Fontographer did away with all the previous ways of laying out magazines and newspapers.
"It was like creating a train that could get off the tracks and play in the field. No more bitmaps or linotype machines, and it impacted everyone," said Gallagher.
"This new revolution meant that your favorite font could now include your company logo, personal signature or additional characters and keyboard support.
"The main reason early adopters bought Fontographer was to edit their fonts or convert them from one format to another. Fontographer users found the intuitive interface to be what they were looking for, and the love relationship was born."
"I'm happy that FontLab is going to breathe new life into Fontographer. I'm even happier to have been asked to be a part of the team. The FontLab team has made a genuine commitment to Fontographer, and I can say they aren't going to let it become an orphan," Gallagher said.
According to Harrison, the company intends to fill the niche that is now lacking in the desktop publishing arena.
"We have FontLab, AsiaFont Studio, and we wanted to add to those with something that was user-friendly and familiar to lots of people. We also didn't want to have a big learning curve for users."
FontLab is focusing on developing the brand version.
The first objective, says Harrison, is making it compatible with OS X. It also plans to address a memory problem wherein users are having difficulty running the program on Windows-based systems in which memory is a gigabyte or more of RAM.
The first upgrade of Fontographer will be released without any additional features, and then FontLab will release a version in the following year with new features, Harrison said.
For its part, Macromedia declined to comment further on the purchase.
FontLab will offer upgrade paths from TypeTool 2 to Fontographer 4.1 for $249, and from Fontographer 4.1 to FontLab 4.6 for $299.
It will also offer upgrades to FontLab Studio 5 and AsiaFont Studio; those prices are not yet announced.
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