FontLab Studio 5 is our classic font editor for macOS and Windows. It has been used by Adobe, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Monotype, Morisawa and almost every other major font foundry in the world. It is the comprehensive solution for font foundries, professional type designers, typographers and graphic design studios, allowing them to design typefaces and create or modify fonts.

FontLab Studio 5 offers a complete integrated workflow for font creation, from font family management, through multilingual glyph design and spacing and kerning, all the way to automatic and manual hinting and Python scripting.

IMPORTANT FontLab Studio 5 now works on macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey, but we recommend FontLab 7, which is the modern successor to FontLab Studio 5.

Professional glyph drawing

Draw from scratch or turn your scans into perfect outlines

Comfortable Bézier creation

Many designers say that FontLab Studio 5 is their favorite Bézier drawing tool ever. A powerful combination of the Pen, Rectangle, Ellipse, Knife and Eraser tools allows you to create precise Bézier curves. With numeric and freeform Transformations, both manual and font-wide, you can quickly adjust your glyphs to match your design.

Import bitmaps or vectors,
trace and clean up

Copy-paste vectors from Adobe Illustrator or import EPS outline artwork. Import monochrome images and use them as reference, or automatically Trace them into Bézier contours, specifically optimized for type design. Clean up, Optimize, correct and simplify your contours with a variety of smart algorithms for perfect quality.

Better curves with FontAudit

Easily spot odd points and suspicious curves with FontAudit, our live outline custodian that will visually show you errors and possible issues in your glyphs, and sometimes even automatically fix them. Use FontAudit to find those lines that are just off of vertical, missing extrema points, and tangent curves that aren’t quite smooth.

In-context design:
Shape groups & Neighbors

FontLab Studio 5 dynamically displays the glyphs relevant to the one you’re working on, with Shape groups, a semi-transparent glyph cloud stacked behind the current outline, and Neighbors, glyphs left and right of your glyph. This way, you can quickly switch between related lettershapes and design them in a coordinated fashion.