Font Creator 5 Home Edition Review

It's a little hard to figure out who the intended audience for High-Logic's Font Creator Home really is; their website pitches the product as useful for both the hobbyist and the graphic design pro, but I feel both groups will come away at least a little disappointed.

The installation went smoothly for me, and I appreciated the colorfully sophisticated artwork in the custom installer, but I was surprised at the choice of splash screen that appeared when I launched the application: it features an image of medieval "copisti," or scribe, laboring to hand copy a book in a scriptorium...a practice that was made obsolete by the invention of moveable typography that digital type is based on...

On launch, only three of the large bank of icons in the somewhat dated-looking interface are enabled: you can create a new file, open an installed font, or open an existing font file. Clicking any of the three lights up the rest of the icons, and you're off and running. If you're like me, you'll probably want to start by editing an existing type face, and the simplest route is to open an already installed font. Doing so will reward you with a table of all the characters in the font file, looking something like a typographically-flavored periodic table of the elements. Double-clicking any character in the table will enlarge that character against a grid and allow you to start editing.

Font Creator's editing tools are spartan, but adequate: you can add rectangles, ellipses, imported graphics, and new contours, or just turn on 'point mode' and start grabbing and dragging the points that make up a character's outline directly. There are also tools to scale, flip and rotate the entire character. There is also a wizard that can apply a stack of effects across the whole font--in case you ever wanted a Comic Sans Outline, for example.

But what if you want to start from scratch? The program is called Font Creator, after all. In that case, you have two choices: you can either build the characters in place using the drawing tools mentioned above, or you can import graphics that you have either been drawn by hand and scanned-in or created in some other image editing software. The first method is going to be very rough going even for the very patient. The second method is more practical, but requires reasonably advanced skills in another software package, even if only to clean up and separate the scans: you'll need software that can output common Internet raster files like GIF, JPG, and PNG or more Microsoft-centric formats like BMP and WMF. Strangely, the more "pro" vector formats like AI or DXF are not supported.

And that begins to point toward the identity crisis this software seems to have...on the one hand, a pretty high degree of type-specific knowledge is assumed of the user even in the home version (Know what a kerning pair is? The difference between a character and a glyph? What the x-height is?), but on the other, the "pro" tools (even in the pro version) seem a bit meager.

The documentation continues the theme: the aptly named "brief" quickstart tutorial demonstrates how to create contours using the editing tools for the letter 'A,' how to import an image for the letter 'B,' and then how to save and install the resulting two character font. All in a few illustrated pages. But there is no discussion of what a reasonable work-flow might look like for more than one character, or what considerations would go into actually creating a whole character set. The documentation jumps from very simple step-by-step for the most basic case to deep jargon and sophisticated assumptions rather quickly--with only sporadic term definitions to help.

My feeling is that this is a competent tool, but only really useful for the extremely serious hobbyist or patient graphic designer on a tight budget (since the price of this tool is less than many single professionally designed typefaces). Casual users will not be able to use the tool to anywhere near its full potential, and will likely create typographic monstrosities. Professional graphic designers will find better tools, but at higher price points.