A big THANK YOU to the folks at FontLab

André G. Isaak

For those who haven't noticed, FontLab released an upgraded version of FontLab 5 Studio today which addresses the various MacOS incompatibilities which I’ve been incessantly complaining about.

Michael Jarboe

Excellent! Thanks for your help and persistence André.

Thomas Phinney

It’s true. And it is more than that. Over the last few hours, we at FontLab released updates to Mac versions of:

• FontLab Studio 5 (5.1.6)
• Fontographer 5 (5.2.4)
• TypeTool 3 (3.1.3).

These address not only major incompatibility introduced with macOS 10.14.4, but also the 10.13/10.14 copy/paste issues for FontLab Studio and TypeTool.

I would have said more in advance, but of course it wasn’t necessarily clear how this would all turn out until we did it. I didn’t want to promise anything we couldn’t be certain of delivering.

John Savard

This is wonderful news. I thank you as well, although I'm not one of your customers, because I think it is very important for such products and choices to be available.

André G. Isaak

Actually, it *almost* fixes the clipboard bug. Now you can copy and paste glyphs and outlines, but you can no longer copy and paste opentype code.

André G. Isaak

Michael Jarboe said:

Excellent! Thanks for your help and persistence André.

Don't thank me. I may have sacrificed a goat, but it was the people at FontLab who intoned the magical incantations.

Chris Lozos

YES!!! Thank you, FontLab team! There may be hope for you after all!

Kent Lew

Wait, you mean I might be able to actually contemplating updating my system now?!

What will that mean for my hard-earned reputation of always being several versions behind? ;-)

But seriously, thank you Font Lab!

Andreas Stötzner

Please forgive my ignorance, but does that mean one could run FontLab Studio 5 now under Mac OS X.10? (I currently run 10.10.5.)

André G. Isaak

You should always have been able to run fontlab studio 5 in Mac OS X 10.10. The problems started to arise with 10.12 IIRC.

Thomas Phinney

You could already run FontLab Studio 5 on macOS 10.10.

It now runs much better on 10.13 and 10.14.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Kent Lew said:

What will that mean for my hard-earned reputation of always being several versions behind? ;-)

You should still keep that reputation!

Thomas Phinney

@André G. Isaak
We can confirm the issue with pasting OpenType code to the OpenType window. We will likely do another update soon that addresses this, but we want to see if any other new issues emerge first.

* * * * * *

I have to admit I was briefly anxious after I updated my OS to 10.14.4, and confirmed that FontLab Studio 5 didn't work worth beans in that environment. (Before we decided to try to make it work, or had it working, that is.)

Even though I have been using FontLab VI for some time now, as my primary app, knowing I could go back to 5 if/when needed was comforting.

Then I reminded myself that I really hadn’t needed to go back to 5 in almost a year. And suddenly it was a relief, like having taken the training wheels off the bicycle and realizing you aren’t going to fall over.

Of course, I am happy to have FontLab Studio 5, TypeTool 3 and Fontographer 5 updated for Mac. All good. 

Viktor Rubenko

So, FontLab 5 is now alive. My congratulations, gentlemen. 

Thomas Phinney

Well, to be clear, mac0S 10.15 will presumably come in the fall, and is not expected to work with 32-bit apps. And we have no plan to rewrite FontLab Studio 5 as 64-bit (nor retina-savvy).

But yes, other than that, running well on current macOS.

Thomas Phinney

@André G. Isaak
We released a quick update, that fixes what you noted, and some related issues. Should be good now.

André G. Isaak

Thanks again. TypeDrawers doesn't support animated GIFs or I would have included a cat doing cartwheels to show how happy I am!

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

That was close.

John Savard

Thomas Phinney said:

Well, to be clear, mac0S 10.15 will presumably come in the fall, and is not expected to work with 32-bit apps. And we have no plan to rewrite FontLab Studio 5 as 64-bit (nor retina-savvy).

Yes, obviously that would be too much to ask. Hopefully, though, the functionality that was loved in version 5 can eventually be achieved in version 6.

Yury Yarmola

Here is the detailed list of changes. 

5.1.6.7022

1. OpenType I/O (opening & export). The old FontLab core code used a system byte-reordering function for 25 years. There was a bug in our code but in Mac OS 9 and X it still worked fine. This bug went undiscovered until Apple changed some details in this system function in macOS 10.14.4. The Apple change was within the specs, but then our bug manifested, and FLS 5.1.5 couldn't properly open or export OTFs and TTFs. We fixed this bug in 5.1.6. This helps users of macOS 10.14.4 and newer, users of older macOS will see no change. 

2. OS/2.averageWidth. In addition, the above change seems to fix a problem with "averageWidth" parameter of the OS/2 table that was incorrectly saved by earlier versions. This helps users of all macOS. 

3. Copy/Paste. The old copy-paste code was based on a system API that was removed from macOS 10.13. We now updated the code to a newer API. Copy-paste from/to Adobe Illustrator using the new API also was established again. This helps users of macOS 10.13 and 10.14, users of older macOS will see no change. 

4. Progress dialog. FLS was spending most resources to show and update the progress bar that appeared on many occasions, including during OpenType I/O operations. That is improved and both FLS and TT will import and generate up to 10 times faster. This helps users of all macOS. 

5.1.6.7030

1. Paste of non-ASCII text into the the OpenType panel and the Edit Macro panel was improved. The text fields there were never Unicode-capable (and will not be), but pasting Unicode text in 5.1.5 was doing funny things, and in 7022 didn't work. Now it lets you paste macOS Roman characters but removes other characters. 

2. Paste of Unicode text into the Metrics window (both the text bar, and content if the Text tool is active) did work in 5.1.5, did not work in 5.1.6.7022, and in 5.1.6.7030 works again the same way it did in 5.1.5. 

Chris Lozos

Thanks, Yuri!