Help site FontLab 8¶

FontLab has been the go-to app for pro typeface designers to make smooth and consistent curves, comfortably tweak, space and kern a typeface, and then export technically solid fonts in any format.

FontLab 8.4 has 500 improvements over FontLab 8.0, 900 improvements over FontLab 7, and 1,400 improvements over FontLab VI. It’s easier to learn and use, it’s better, and it’s faster. Used by thousands of font professionals worldwide, FontLab 8 is our biggest upgrade ever! See what’s new in 8.4!

With FontLab 8, we’ve revised and modernized every aspect of our powerful, versatile font editor. Discover the new dark UI theme, adjustable Stroke and Brush sketching, polished drawing and editing, non-destructive transformations with Delta, visual and numeric measurement, glyph building with Skin and variable components, spacing and kerning with mouse and trackpad, batch font export and Actions sets, revamped color and gradients, plus support for .glyphs 3, FontForge, COLRv1, and Python 3.

In FontLab 8.4, we’ve gone even further!

Just starting? Switching from another font editor? Quickly access smarter Help, and tool-relevant operations via context menus. Improved widgets give you familiar, clean and easy access to the essential properties of a glyph, component or selection. Each contour, element or layer is just a hover glance away. Name your glyphs & export as feature-rich OpenType!

Busy drawing? Unit grid helps you find your bearings in high zoom. Snapping is instant or relaxed, as you wish. Your italic angle gets full respect as you center, align or add named anchors. Use components in Mask as visual reference. Detach serifs from stems & make them re-usable. Quickly turn contour selections into new components or elements. Scale paths, elements and components to the same width or height.

New Mac? Enjoy massive up to 2× speedups.

CJK designer? Build your CJK fonts with visually controlled variable components and Unicode Variation Selector sequences.

FontLab expert? Match Moves shifts one point on all masters. Your glyph can repeat in multiple places, and ǵét́ś á (truly variable) ḿáŕḱ preview. You can open and export sources in Git-friendly .glyphspackage format. Export post-processing can re-organize the files, run QA checks, build extra files, and push to Git. Visually adjust variable components made from any glyph. Build complex glyphs with better Skin filter.