Top 5 Best Font Editing Software Every Designer Should Try

01. FontLab Studio

FontLab Studio is a highly popular and industry standard font editor tool. With its vast list features, many professional type foundries, typographers and graphic design studios swear by FontLab Studio for their designing type and creating/modifying fonts.

Supported Platforms

Windows and Mac

Pricing

Free Demo Available for Windows and Mac.

Total Package costs $649 or $279/year. 

Educational Discount of $129/year

Benefits :

• Ability to create extensive font families with varying widths and thickness (Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold)

• Generates: OpenType CFF (OTF), OpenType TT / TrueType (TTF), PostScript Type 1 (PFB/PFA/MM), FontLab VFB. Mac version also generates suitcase-based Mac Type 1 and Mac TrueType

• Imports OpenType CFF (OTF), OpenType TT / TrueType (TTF), PostScript Type 1 (PFB/PFA/MM), FontLab VFB, Fontographer FOG, and legacy Mac fonts

• Import Bitmaps and EPS drawings from Illustrator

• Allows user to test the font for Spacing and Kerning issues

• FontLab Studio supports encoding of any Unicode character; which means it allows to design a font in any language, and create all the glyphs needed for that font.

Features :

1. Comfortable Bezier Creation

2. Import Bitmap or Vectors, Trace and Clean up

3. Better curves with FontAudit

4. In-context Design- Shape Groups and neighbors

5. Class-based Metrics and Kerning

6. No Language Barriers with Unicode

7. Advanced Typography with OpenType layout

8. TrueType & PostScript Hinting

02. Glyphs

Glyphs is another top standard font editor tool. It can be used by both beginners and professionals of the type industry. It has a wide range of exciting features which makes it an up and coming type design tool in the design field. It also has a Mini version; a slightly toned down version of the main Glyphs app. It has a few limitations when compared to the main app, but is still nonetheless a cool tool to use.

Supported Platforms

Mac Only

Pricing

- Glyphs & Glyphs Mini are available for download for a 30 day trial period.

- Glyphs Full Licence: $265.62

- Glyphs Mini Licence: $47.82

Benefits:

• Export: OTF, TTF, UFO, Web fonts (EOT, WOFF, WOFF2), Color fonts, Metrics

• Import: OTF, TTF, UFO, and PS Type 1

• Extensive Non-Latin support, including complex scripts like Arabic and Devanagari

• Ability to color your fonts rather than the same old black and white

• Availability of a large variety of plugins and scripts to improve workflows

Features :

1. Smart Vector Tools for Type

2. Covers All Languages

3. Create Colorful Font

4. Automatic OpenType features

5. Full Control Batch Processing

6. Built-in Autohinter

7. Third Party Plugins to Improve Functionality

Font Creator is one of the many popular font editor tools with over 4.5 million downloads. A host of advanced features makes it popular amongst professional users, while its intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone of any level of expertise to use.

Supported Platforms 

Pricing

Benefits:

• FontCreator supports Open Type, True Type and Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts which can be used on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and in all modern web browsers.

• Import high-quality SVG from any vector editing software and Bitmap images

• FontCreator is the first font editor to support the new scalable color fonts extension. This new feature allows you to create multi-colored glyphs for systems that support it while maintaining backward compatibility for systems that do not.

• Manually adjust Kerning to your font; Autokerning feature to automatically kern your fonts.

• Ability to test your fonts on various applications during development.

Features :

1. Font Overview with Categories

2. Work with OpenType, TrueType, and Web Fonts

3. Design High-Quality Fonts

4. Import SVG and Bitmap images

5. Scalable Color Fonts

6. Easy Access to Common Glyph Properties

7. OpenType Layout Features

8. Test Your Fonts

9. Optical Metrics and Kerning

04. Bird Font

Bird Font is an up and coming font editor. It is a project developed by Johann Mattsson. It is a funded project and is constantly getting many upgrades. It is available as Freeware and as a commercial version.

Supported Platforms

Windows, Mac, Linux, & BSD

Saving Formats

Features :

1. OpenType features

2. Export TTF, EOT, and SVG fonts

3. Import SVG and Vectors

4. Convert Raster Images to Vector Fonts

5. Import Background Images

6. Create Stylistic Alternates, Swashes and more

Type 3.2 has been around since 2006 and because of it is pricing, it is preferred by many small offices and home studios. The many new features in the latest updates have made it really easy to create cohesive and beautiful series of fonts. Type Light is a lighter version of Type 3.2.

Supported Platforms

Windows & Mac

Pricing

- Free demo available for Download

- License: $55

- Type Light, a lighter version of Type 3.2 is available for Free for personal use

-  If for business purposes, you need to purchase a Type 3.2 license

Benefits:

• Import: TTF, OTF

• Export: OTF, TTF

• Ability to import vector graphics from Illustrator/Inkscape

• Ability to adjust Kerning visually using with “Grab & Drag” option

• Ability to Auto-create all Latin accented characters.

Features :

1. Interactive Auto Trace

2. Composite Glyph Wizard

3. Glyph and Full Font Preview

4. OpenType Features

5. Import Vector Graphics

6. Adjust Kerning Pairs

http://fontstruct.com/

http://doc.robofont.com/

http://old.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontographer/

https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/