A new version of DTL OTMaster (OTM), the highly sophisticated tool for reviewing, editing, and altering tables and glyphs of fonts with a SFNT-file structure, has become available since today. OTM is a must-have for professional font developers. To quote Adam Twardoch, product and marketing manager at Fontlab Ltd.: ‘
OTMaster works with surgical precision: it will only modify the portions of the font that the developer wishes, leaving all other structures unchanged. This makes OTMaster a great companion to any font editor and an indespensable element even in the most complex OpenType font production workflow.’
Version 5.0 contains a range of additional functionality, among which:
— New powerful
Text Viewer, which includes Harfbuzz for the interpretation of OpenType Layout features. It contains a nice three-state features selector (on / default / off).
— Support for all the competing color OpenType font extensions: Microsoft’s ‘COLR’/‘CPAL’, Adobe’s ‘SVG’, Apple’s ‘sbix’, and Google’s ‘CBDT’/‘CBLC’.
— Updated
Font Viewer, containing now a search field for glyphs, unicodes...
— Updated
Side by Side Viewer, which contains among other new options, a ‘Winding fill’ as opposed to the standard fill option.
— Enhanced and now fully mature
Glyph Editor (basically a compact version of DTL FontMaster), with improved guideline and grid functionality, improved measurement options, new clipboard with support for multiple entries, etcetera, etcetera.
DTL OTMaster 5.0 is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Please note that because of the inclusion of Harfbuzz the lowest supported Mac OS X version is Lion (instead of Snow Leopard in case of version 3.7) now.
From today on until the 6th of January 2015, OTM 5.0 can be purchased with a special 25%
Christmas-holiday discount. Current 3.7 licensees are eligible for an upgrade against € 7.50 administration and handling costs. FontLab Ltd. customers can do this via FL Ltd.’s
website and DTL customers can apply for this via DTL’s
FontTools shop. Registered users owning any other previous versions can upgrade for € 50.
DTL OTMaster 5.0 can be purchased directly from FontLab Ltd. and DTL’s FontTools shop (web addresses are mentioned above).
Comments
Thanks!
In the Text Viewer, you can choose the text direction, script and language, apply the default features for each script and selectively enable or disable each feature.
You can show or hide the text boxes and glyph indices, and you can export the rendered image as PDF.
The Text Viewer alone makes it worth the upgrade.
In terms of Indic script support, the Apple CoreText engine support in Yosemite is pretty good, and in one important aspect just leapfrogged Uniscribe (as has the most recent Harfbuzz).
From a proofing perspective, what VOLT does is a little different, in that it shows only what is happening at the lookup level, not interaction with shaping engines. So, for example, there is no reordering for Indic scripts. In order to mimic shaping engine behaviour in VOLT, you need to manually set the appropriate glyph order for the state you are testing. That's actually quite useful sometimes, when one needs to determine if a bug is in the shaping engine or the font lookups.
This short video on YouTube shows how I used DTL OTMaster to check the OpenType features of DTL Flamande. This typeface combines textura minuscules with roman capitals, besides Gothic majuscules. It was Plantin himself who combined Van den Keere’s ‘Grasses capitales de 3 regles mediane’ with the lowercase of the Canon Flamand in his Psalterium from 1571.
The development of DTL Flamande started in 1992. That year Matthew Carter and yours truly were both speakers at the Didot seminar, which was organized by URW in Hamburg. During the event Matthew granted me the rights on his revival. Roughly 25 years later I invited German type designer Lukas Schneider, who holds a master’s degree from KABK’s TypeMedia and who successfully graduated at the Expert class Type design course in Antwerp, to enhance the character set. The full story can be read in the September 2017 edition of DTL’s NewsLetterNews.
Will this be a free or paid update if coming from OTM 6?
F.
Hi Josh,
Last month at the TYPO Labs 2018 conference Jürgen Willrodt and I demonstrated the latest beta version of OTM, including the CFF2 support. Work has almost completed and after adding a few improvements and removing some small bugs, OTM 8 (so, we will skip version 7, which was only used internally at URW and DTL) will be ready. Coming autumn OTM 8 will be released together with FoundryMaster 1.0.
Best, Frank
OTM has a lot of hidden gems, for example the Side by Side Viewer. IMHO it is the Swiss knife for font development. The people working on it (Dr. Jürgen Wilrodt, Axel Stoltenberg, Hartmut Schwarz, and yours truly) are all in the font (software) business for almost 40 years now. Together (since 1991!) we form one of the oldest teams in the type trade, I reckon.