FontLab Studio 5 is the company?s next-generation professional font editor for Windows, with a Mac OS version in the works. As a major upgrade of its predecessor FontLab 4.6, FontLab Studio 5 is a comprehensive solution for font foundries, professional type designers, typographers and graphic design studios, allowing them to design type, create, manipulate and modify fonts. FontLab Studio 5 supports all major outline font formats, including Type 1, TrueType, Multiple Master and OpenType.

?The major focus of this release has been put on in-context type design,? said Yuri Yarmola, Vice President R&D at Fontlab Ltd. and the application?s principal engineer. ?Our new metrics and kerning editing environment adds a second dimension to the process of letterspacing by allowing the type designer to see the glyphs not only in a horizontal string but on a true two-dimensional page. The new neighbor and shape groups layers add another dimension to the process of glyph design by dynamically previewing related characters right in the glyph editing window.?

According to Yarmola, practically every aspect of the application has been revised. ?It was the users who shaped the development of the application. More than 90% of the changes in FontLab Studio 5 are based directly on customer feedback,? says Yarmola. The highlights of FontLab Studio 5 also include

* new improved proofing and printing,
*improved Bezier drawing tools,
*integrated autotracing (formerly only available in ScanFont, a separate product),
*improved font merging and blending,
*better OpenType and Unicode support,
*better autohinting,
*improved Python scripting support with RoboFab
as well as hundreds of other improvements.