Wish list for Affinity Designer: FontMaker

[11Arts]

A font editor/font maker built into Designer would be awesome. Since you usually work with vector graphics in Designer anyway, it would be great to be able to convert your own font designs into fonts there as well.

[Komatös]

This wish will not be realized in 1000 years.

Do you ever ask yourselves how nonsensical some of your wishes are?

I have not found a single post in the forums of the two well-known manufacturers of font editors in which the wish was expressed to add functions for vector design tasks.

Ask Inkscape if they can add a font development environment to the program. You won't like the answer any more than you like mine here.

[dsnaps12]

That app is long gone and it was called Fontographer. I think the last version was 5.0. A lot of designers actually used it to create custom font sets.
 

[GRAFKOM]

Yes Sir. I've been using CorelDraw to create fonts since the 90's. 30 years are slowly passing by. I think Serif technically could do it, but 1000 years?

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, dsnaps12 said:

That app is long gone and it was called Fontographer. I think the last version was 5.0. A lot of designers actually used it to create custom font sets.

Fontlab still sells Fontographer 5.

All efforts have been poured into the superior Fontlab Studio for years.

[Bobby Henderson]

The font building capability that was in CorelDRAW was nothing more than very rudimentary. It stank next to a dedicated font creation application such as Fontographer.

Fontographer was effectively a dead application for many years. In the mid 1990's when Macromedia acquired Fontographer from the original developer Altsys they hardly did anything to improve it other than change the brand name. I was very frustrated by that. And Altsys wasn't exactly doing much with Fontographer either. Version 4.1 was released in 1991 and it remained stuck at version 4.1.5 while Macromedia had the rights to it. Fontographer was just another app to flesh out the Freehand Graphics Studio (Macromedia also acquired Freehand from Altsys). Going into the late 1990's Macromedia dropped Fontographer from subsequent versions of the Freehand Graphics Studio. It wasn't until the mid 2000's that FontLab Ltd bought the rights to Fontographer. They ported an OSX version of basically the same 4.1.5 app in 2005. It wasn't until 2010 that Fontographer got a proper update. On the bright side, anyone who had old Fontographer licenses from a Freehand suite or whatever got upgrade pricing for the new version of Fontographer. Plus they could use the option to buy FontLab at a discount.

FontLab 8 has a very broad set of features and capabilities for professional font creation. It's expensive though ($499). Knowing Python is helpful to get the most out of the application. Glyphs is popular, but it's a Mac-only application (cost: €299). Glyphs Mini is a "beginners" app and costs €49. Font Creator has multiple versions. The "home" edition costs $49, standard is $149 and the pro edition is $199.

FontSelf is probably the best implementation of a font creation utility put inside of a traditional vector drawing application. It installs as an Adobe Illustrator plugin. Does Affinity Designer have any capability to run third party plugins?

There is a few different free/open source font creation applications.

[Komatös]

8 hours ago, GRAFKOM said:

Yes Sir. I've been using CorelDraw to create fonts since the 90's. 30 years are slowly passing by. I think Serif technically could do it, but 1000 years?

Replace the 1000 years with never. But that was too daring for me, because, never say never! 😜

 

9 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I think @Komatös's reply is a little bit harsh.

A little harsh? Maybe, but that's certainly due to my slight autism. 🖖🏼

[Patrick Connor]

@11Arts

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

Serif staff don't normally comment on feature requests, but I'm disappointed that your first post has been in some respects derided, sorry.

I also doubt Serif would implement this anytime soon, but I appreciate you telling us it's important to you.

[Archangel]

On 3/8/2023 at 6:22 PM, 11Arts said:

A font editor/font maker built into Designer would be awesome. Since you usually work with vector graphics in Designer anyway, it would be great to be able to convert your own font designs into fonts there as well.

This is not a silly request. Adding this sort of functionality to a suite of applications which includes all you need for creating print publications is really a sensible idea.

Implementation of a full font editor persona into Affinity would perhaps be preferable to simply allowing a basic export of designer vectors into a simple font file. However, it sounds like a major effort of system designer and programmer time to implement it in a high quality and professional manner.

If it were successfully implemented then Affinity would become a suite with serious clout in the creative field much more than it currently has. Although the purchase price of the software would also have to increase substantially.

Plugin support maybe the way to go for this to allow third party programs to fill the gap.

[Bobby Henderson]

I think Serif needs to focus on improving the core vector object editing features of Affinity Designer rather than going down a rabbit hole at trying to turn the application into a font editor. The application needs to get better at the basics before trying to take side roads into other specialties. And there are a LOT of different specialties, each of which have specific applications that concentrate on those things in a far superior, far more focused manner. Font editing is a very specific thing. So is 3D modeling and animation. Most graphics suites split vector graphics applications and pixel-based image editing applications into distinctly separate applications. I would hate it if Adobe tried combining Photoshop and Illustrator into one single application. It would stink. In 30 or so years of using graphics software I have never seen a software developer succeed at creating a single graphics application that could do everything. The best applications focus on a specific specialty.