User Guide

Introduction
What a Long, Strange Trip It’s
Been
Introducing Fontographer
How to get the most out of your Fontographer materials
Before you begin
by David Berlow
They say that good things come in small packages. When it
comes to Fontographer, this has never been so true. In
1985, I was working at Bitstream designing type on a large
proprietary font design system. For those of you who don’t
know what this means, I’ll tell you. Large means it wouldn’t
fit on a desktop because it was larger than a desk. We had
workstations that were about six feet wide by six feet deep
by four feet tall, with a 19" vector-monitor, a mouse with
four or five buttons, and a keyboard with a few dozen extra
keys. If you must know, this was trucktop publishing.
Proprietary means that we developed the software and
some of the hardware ourselves so no one else could use it,
and there were only two or three engineers in the world
who knew how to make changes, additions or fixes to the
software and this happened quite infrequently and very
slowly. In addition, proofing the fonts required a series of
conversions, and mastery of a typesetting command
language about as friendly as Kanji.
Into this world, one day, came two visitors from somewhere
down south. They carried a little box that, because it was so
small, I thought was surely a kitchen appliance, a toaster or
blender perhaps. But when they plugged it in there seemed
to be type drawing going on inside of the little box. There
were about ten Bitstream type designers in the room and
we all gasped. I climbed upon the table to get a closer look
and sure enough, there was a letter on that tiny screen. But
Fontographer User's Manual
Introduction Page #1