I know that I’m not the only one who has been sticking with FontLab 5 despite the copy/paste issue that arose on Macs post-Sierra.
Just to let everyone know, the macOS 10.14.4 update kills it completely. Working with existing .vfbs still seems to work, but opening existing fonts is broken. OTFs will open, but their unicode assignments are missing and the UPM is messed up. TTFs won't open at all.
Just a heads up.
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"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
– FS5
Me, too. It also lets me run the old Mac versions of ScanFont and BitFonter. Of course, you can run the Windows versions of any of these in a Windows VM on a Mac, too.
From the symptoms Andre described, it may be in some way related, at least in part, to support files used by FontLab Studio 5, and perhaps their location. We are looking into it.
(But honestly, if you're a committed FontLab user, it'd probably make more sense to just get used to the new version.)
I know I’m not going to change any minds here, but I just wanted to briefly comment on the above.
While it may have been released as “FontLab VI”, I tend to think of the new version as “Victoria 1.0” since FontLab VI is really an entirely new program rather than an upgraded version of an existing one. As such, we’re moving from a mature product (FLS5) to a product which, while having a great deal of potential, is still very much in its infancy and still has lots of kinks to be resolved.
A comparable case would be the transition from PageMaker to InDesign. I think everyone would admit that InDesign is a superior product but, for those who remember InDesign 1.0, many of its more advanced features were severely hampered by the fact that it still lacked many features found in the more mature PageMaker.
InDesign 1.0 was released in late August of 1999. PageMaker, however, continued to be updated into early 2004, so there was over four years of overlap between the two products. And (as Mark Simonson’s post reminded me) the first several versions included a PageMaker plugin kit designed to ease the transition between the two by providing a more familiar interface.
The clipboard bug in FontLab Studio, on the other hand, came to light while FontLab VI was still in public beta, so FontLab effectively dropped support for it’s older, more mature, product before its successor had even been officially released — a situation which I don’t recall seeing before where a major application is involved.
I acknowledge that this comparison is not entirely fair, Adobe being a far larger company than FontLab and thus able to devote more resources to legacy products, but it still seems to me that support for FLS5 (at least the Mac version) was dropped prematurely.
The clipboard problem is caused by a change Apple made in macOS. Unhappily, they provided no solution for that (nor we found a workaround). But, as I stated above, you can still copy glyphs between fonts using drag-and-drop.
This way, FontLab Studio 5 is still fully functional in both newer Windows and macOS — except the new 10.14.4, of course.
InDesign 1.0 to 1.5
I am a user of InDesign since its inception. And, while I was not able to use 1.0 as a production tool, the scenario changed completely when version 1.5 came to light.
My opinion may be biased, but I believe the jump between FontLab VI 6.0 and the latest 6.1.3 is comparable to InDesign's. FontLab is quite conservative regarding version numbers so x.1.3 may not reflect how many new tools were added nor the amount of improvements and bug fixes were made.
Of course, we are aware FLVI still needs several adjusts and improvements, but I invite users who had a bad experience with early versions to try the last one. And to report their findings in our forum.
A FontLab Studio 5 mode?
An interesting idea. To some extent, this is already under adoption.
Those who don't like FLVI elements can work with components. It is still not the same, but the overall use matches FLS5's. A number of tools and behaviors from FLS5 were brought back recently, especially in 6.1.2 and 6.1.3. And more is expected for 6.1.4.
The user requests in our forum are serving as a thermometer for this, so the feedback you give there is extremely important.
A final note: it does not matter what I say or how much each version improves if you need a given tool that is not available. We are working hard to close the gaps, but we understand that for some of you FontLab VI is just not a choice (for now).
And the drag and drop is only a partial solution — it doesn’t provide full functionality.
On an unrelated note, I just noticed that the 10.14.4 upgrade also breaks Fontographer 5.2.3 (this isn't particularly important to me, but it may be for others).
Note: TTFs nominally “open,” but without any glyphs.
You can re-encode an opened OTF based on glyph names, of course—which might be useful on occasion, but hardly entirely satisfactory for general ongoing use.
Generating a OT test displaying a system font? Try again. No? Try again. No? One more time. There you go!
Does importing an axis put your equal sign and other symmetrical shapes in the wrong order. Close it open it. Try again? Still no? Keep doing it over and over and it eventually will get it right.
Is blend shuffling glyphs with identical components like colon, ellipsis, divide, double quotes, double guillemots? Blend the same fonts again and again and you'll see different results.
Is blend killing half your kerns? That's only happens one in ten times so you'll probably just have to try once more.
Exporting a typeface and one font didn't work? Give it another shot.
All of this I understand full well. I am aware that software must occasionally be rewritten from the ground up and that this will inevitably introduce new bugs, and that there will usually be a time lag before all features of the old version are reimplemented.
My issue is the complete lack of overlap between the old and new versions. Support for FontLab 5 on the Mac effectively ended with High Sierra despite the fact that the new version had not even been introduced yet. Because of the complications which can arise when introducing a new code base, every other company of which I am aware normally continues to maintain the old version for a period of time following the the release of a version built around a new code-base. But this has not been the case here.