Font Studio and Hebrew Fonts

Fred Goldman · Post by **Fred Goldman** » Tue Jan 31, 2006 8:37 pm

I just came across Font Studio and it looks very promising. I am a typesetter and I often need to change the kerning of fonts. I work mainly with Hebrew fonts. Is Font Studio the right program? Should I go for the Professional Edition? How does it compare to TypeTool from FontLab?

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 4:47 pm

Font Studio?

That is a font pack of Hebrew fonts. Presumably you mean Font Creator.

It is not easy to offer an unbiased opinion as I have been using Font Creator for a long time, while I have only had a quick look at the free trial of Type Tool. Here are some of the key differences that I noticed.

Font Creator's free trial is the full and uncrippled Professional Edition for thirty days. Type tool seems to be an unlimited trial, but has crippled font saving features.
Font Creator Professional has an easy to use wizard for automatic kerning, with import of kerning pairs from a file or manual selection of kerning pairs. I couldn't immediately figure out how to modify kerning either manually or automatically in Type Tool, but the feature is there.
Font Creator removes hinting if you modify a glyph, but not if you just change kern values or other metrics. It doesn't yet add hinting. Type Tool supports automatic hinting.
Type Tool offers the option of working in Type 1 mode using nodes and handles. Font Creator works only in Truetype mode using on-curve and off-curve points to manipulate glyph outlines.
Font Creator works directly on Truetype fonts. Type Tool saves files in its own format, and you generate fonts to get Truetype or Postscript Type 1 Fonts.
General Impressions: Font Creator is easier to use. Type Tool does Autohinting, but seems to have a steeper learning curve and a less attractive interface.

Both programs are available as Free trials, so you can try them both, and come to your own conclusions.

If you want auto-kerning, then you need the Professional Edition of Font Creator. The Home Edition only supports manual kerning. I have no experience of working on Right to Left scripts. I know that other Font Creator users work with Hebrew fonts, or CJK fonts.

Fred Goldman · Post by **Fred Goldman** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 7:25 pm

Thank you very much for the reply Bhikkhu,

Sorry, I meant Font Creator, after searching the web for a good font editor for over an hour and comparing the features the names start to get a little foggy

I noticed when searching the forum that there are people creating Hebrew fonts, but are those Unicode or symbol fonts, because I need to be able to edit Unicode fonts.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Wed Feb 01, 2006 9:00 pm

They are Unicode Fonts

Yehuda · Post by **Yehuda** » Thu Feb 02, 2006 11:08 am

I use Font Creator (v. 4.5) a lot to remap Hebrew fonts to different encodings, including Unicode, since I have programs that use different encodings for Hebrew. Unicode is the easiest to do since when the encoding is chosen you see the name of the character, so you know you have the right encoding. For changing kerning, I don't think it matters whether the encoding is Unicode or something else.