FontLab wants to know how is your workspace

Igor Freiberger

We at FontLab want to know how is your workspace!

Please send us how many captures you find useful.

You can also export and send workspace definitions.

Nick Shinn

I would appreciate a little more visible structure in the UI.
It’s a bit wishy-washy the way that content floats around, seemingly untethered.

Here is a comparison of v.5 with v.8, the same palette, at the same size.
I much prefer v.5—please make the present UI more “Classic,” at least by increasing the background tone.

Ray Larabie

I call this setup Twin Panel and it's what I use most of ther time. For kerning and classes, I use the stock workspaces. It's 4K, and about 60 cm wide on my monitor.

Thomas Phinney

I agree 110% with Nick. The grayness of the icons in the transform panel are a good example of something that is just harder to read, at some normal sizes.

I recently did some experiments on video with FontLab 5 and 8. Aside from some jagginess from running FLS 5 for Windows on my Mac at non-retina (effectively half as many pixels), the FLS 5 interface still showed up much better on video, honestly.

This is also true for normal users, IMO. It “looks nicer,” but at a real cost.

Thomas Phinney

I can’t screen-shot my day-to-day setup easily as I use three monitors, and often spread stuff across two or even three, depending on my needs at the time.

But here is a single-screen version of one typical setup for me. The identity of the panels might change depending on what I am up to. The whole font window might move to another monitor while spacing or kerning moves to the front. Or if I need a bunch of panels, they all go on another screen. (I used to default to having panels on the screen to the right, back when I had a 4K as my main screen; moving to 5K x 2K really helped.)

John Hudson

I posted mine here.

John Butler

I bought the upgrade from VI about four months ago and have not had a chance to use it yet since starting my new very non-font job, nor will I until I get a new monitor, but VI was a low point for me. FL4 and FLS5 were my favorites. The Stroke tool sold me on 8. I am excited about the productivity advances.

Nick’s comment above mirrors a gripe I have with all software after 2007 or so. Ever since Windows Vista, UIs have started wasting white space. Dialog boxes are over twice as big, UI fonts are larger, none of it is user-configurable, and it’s in everything from the OS to the applications. Developers want an application to move seamlessly from a desktop-size screen to a phone screen, and they choose widget sets that allow this, “responsive design” or somesuch bollocks. It then worms its way into widget libraries and gets used by developers not necessarily being deliberate in their choice of it. Inescapable hypermodernism. It seemed to peak with Windows 8, then thankfully dialed back a bit. And judging by Ray’s screenshot above, FontLab 8 is no egregious offender.

My favorite UIs are dense, like modular analog synths simulated in Reason or Bitwig over on the audio side. Ham radios. That kind of stuff. I like to see every control. But de gustibus and all that.

John Hudson

My favorite UIs are dense, like modular analog synths...

Allow me to introduce you to the TypeRig panels plug-in...

  

Thomas Phinney

Lol. I was going to point to that myself as an example of ultra-dense font info presentation. Given the amount of data being presented I am not sure there is a better way, but it IS awfully dense.

Tural Alisoy