Do you have enough fonts?
   Well, everyone has "enough" fonts. And if you don't, you can get 'em. There are dozens of download sites with fonts, bunches of CDs loaded with fonts and, of course, all the traditional font foundries, like Adobe and Bitstream, as well.
   With all these gazillions of fonts out there, why would anyone want more? Well, just suppose you need a very special font, or you find a font in one format (such as Adobe Type 1 or Truetype) and want to convert it from one to the other. Or, just suppose, you found this really great freeware font but it doesn't have "curly quotes." And you like curly quotes.
   Enter FontLab, an extremely powerful, easy-to-use font editor. Editor, we said. An editor lets you create all new fonts (how do you think all those fonts got created in the first place), tweeak existing fonts, add characters to existing fonts or just about anything else.
   Look to the left. This is an "A" (as it is shown in FontLab when you load in a particular type face. You can change this "A" and the way we want to change this particular one is to make it have a white center and a little drop shadow.
   We go about this by transforming the "A" and we do this by calling up the dialog box you see at the right. This allows us to apply a drop shadow and reverse out the "A.", that is, to transform it. In this case, we have chosen to offset the shadow by 50 units to the right and 50 units down. And we're also going to make the outline of the "A" 10 units.
   All we have to do is press an "OK" button and our old "A" becomes an "A like this. A whole new "A!" Not too shabby, huh?
   Of course, you can do this with the whole character set, and do lots of other things as well. FontLab lets tweak to your heart's content. If a font is just a little too bold, you can make it less so. Heck, if you want a mirror image of a font, FontLab can do that, too.
   But, up to this point, I've just been fooling around with FontLab's abilities. There is a lot more you can do with it. In fact, you can do most anything. Even create a font in your own handwriting. I did. Its fun.
   Here is the heart of FontLab, the character editing screen. You might recognize this fella, he's the second "A" above. If you have done any work with any of the outline editing programs like CorelDraw!, you might also recognize the little dots, which are nodes for beizier curves – which is how fonts are created. You just move the dots, edit the curves (straight lines are also curves) and change the letter to anything you want.
   We're certainly not going to try to give you a tutorial in editing fonts here (besides, the documentation with FontLab is rather good), but we just ask you to imagine that, instead of a capital "I: with an accent mark over it (ALT-0205) that you'll probably never use, you create your own signature as a "letter" of a font. Want to sign your name, press ALT-0205 and there it is!
   (Does the person formally known as Prince use FontLab to sign his name to his letters in Word? He could.)
   This is a very, very powerful program that, truthfully, can do just about anything you want to do with a font. There are tons of options and functions, from the transformations we illustrated above to creating hints (which are the things fonts use to make them readable in both small and large sizes). However, there is one option which deserves special mention: multiple master fonts.
   Multiple master fonts are something a little new in the font world and are very expensive. With them, the person who owns the font itself can make changes to the font without a program like FontLab. Depending on the options built into the font when it is created, a multiple master font user can make the font thinner or heavier, change the up-to-down aspect ratio, slant the font or do a wide variety of other things. This is pretty neat, although the creation of a multiple master font is more difficult than the creation of a "normal" font.
   Its the latest, though, and FontLab has it. Along with anything else you would want to use to make a font, no matter how easy or complicated you want the process to be.

   Link to the FontLab web site