Font editors - documentation and communities

Chr. St. Jørgensen
Chr. St. Jørgensen Posts: 4
in Type Design Software
Which font editor has the best documentation and active community, FontLab, RoboFont or Glyphs? Being newcomer this is more important to me than features and price. What are your thoughts?
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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,227
    All three have active online forums:
    http://forum.fontlab.com/
    https://forum.glyphsapp.com/
    http://forum.robofont.com/

    I've found both FontLab VI and Glyphs to have pretty good documentation. RoboFont is more of a platform than an out-of-the-box tool, so doesn't have the same kind of features documentation.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    edited November 2018
    I imagine it's possible that the FontLab community has a different character now than when I last used the program, but I can say that one of the many satisfying aspects of switching to Glyphs years ago was the active development, helpful forum, clear tutorials, well-integrated third-party tools, and responsive development/troubleshooting team. 
  • k.l.
    k.l. Posts: 109
    I would not complain about http://robofont.com/documentation/ either. Especially see the introduction and workspace sections.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    I have had a number of people write to me and comment on how massively improved FontLab’s support is nowadays compared to several years ago.

    We hired two more people (@Pooja Saxena and @Igor Freiberger) to help with support and documentation for FontLab VI a year and a half ago (seven months before retail release of the app).

    We also created a new online documentation system (rather than a static manual as we had always had before) for FontLab VI, and changed our support portal to a new system around the same time we launched the app, last December. Even before that (just over three years ago now) we moved to a new bug-tracking system so as to better track and resolve bugs and feature suggestions, both from users and internally reported.

    Our rate of being able to identify and fix bugs on the newer code base, with the newer systems in place is much higher. When bugs reported by users are verified as fixed, we notify the people who reported the bug to us, so they can know to expect the fix in the next app update. Actually, that's something I usually do personally, as part of overseeing the bug-tracking, support and much of the release notes.
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 302
    I'm not sure if your interest in font editors is limited to Mac OS X, but if you have access to Windows, FontCreator is another font editor you might want to consider. You can see the forum here:

    And the online manual for FontCreator 11 is here:
  • Ori Ben-Dor
    Ori Ben-Dor Posts: 386
    Thomas Phinney said:
    I have had a number of people write to me and comment on how massively improved FontLab’s support is nowadays compared to several years ago.
    I'm very satisfied with FontLab's support nowadays.
  • Igor Freiberger
    Igor Freiberger Posts: 279
    edited November 2018
    In FontLab forum we added a tag to identify topics where instructions or solutions are shared –not only by the FontLab team, but also between users: Learning topics.
  • Chr. St. Jørgensen
    Chr. St. Jørgensen Posts: 4
    Thanks for all your input and thoughts. I do agree with Thomas Phinney FontLab’s documentation is really solid and well put together. 
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    From the inside, we see all the problems.  :P   But we keep on working on it!
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    As mentioned, have a look at the forum but also https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials and
    https://glyphsapp.com/get-started
  • k.l.
    k.l. Posts: 109
    Off topic, given the thread's title, yet it needs to be pointed out that the remark "RoboFont is more of a platform than an out-of-the-box tool" is a myth at best. RoboFont is an out-of-the-box font editor, full-fledged, and reliable one on top of that. There exists a not insignificant number of extensions that add extra functionality, many free https://robofontmechanic.com/, a few paid http://extensionstore.robofont.com/, and installing/updating extensions is as easy as double-clicking a .roboFontExt file. While some of these are nice-to-have, none of these are required to draw type and generate fonts.
  • Cory Maylett
    Cory Maylett Posts: 248
    edited November 2018
    As a user of both, I've found the documentation for both Fontlab VI and Glyphs to be absolutely first rate. I can say much the same about the customer service. All questions on the forums for both are answered quickly and quite thoroughly.

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