Overview

FontCreator is a font editor for designing and modifying TrueType and OpenType fonts on Windows and macOS, in active development since 1997 with a feature set that has grown to cover almost every workflow a working type designer needs.

The list below summarises what FontCreator can do today. Detailed walkthroughs are in the user manual and on the tutorials page.

Formats and Interchange

FontCreator opens, edits, and exports the formats type designers and developers actually use:

• TrueType and OpenType fonts (.ttf, .otf).
• Web fonts (.woff and .woff2) with superior compression.
• CFF and CFF2 outline formats — quadratic and cubic Bézier curves throughout.
• Color fonts with the COLR, CPAL, and SVG tables.
• Variable fonts — both TrueType and CFF2 flavours.
• Unified Font Object (UFO) and DesignSpace for round-tripping with the rest of the toolchain.
• Glyphs source files (.glyphs v3) — full round-trip including masks, smart components, path decorations, and stroke envelopes.
• TrueType Collections — extract individual fonts.
• VOLT and AFDKO (.fea) feature code — import, edit, and export.
• Vector imports — SVG, EPS, AI, PDF, IGES.
• Bitmap imports — PNG, BMP, GIF, JPG.

Up to 65,535 glyphs per font (the OpenType maximum).

What's New in FontCreator 16

The most significant additions in the current release:

• Mask — flag any contour or component as a mask to subtract it from the geometry that precedes it. Compound shapes (rings, donuts) subtract as a single hole. Non-destructive in the editor and project file; flattened automatically on export.
• Background Layer — a parallel layer beside every master and helper, with its own outline, metrics, anchors, and color.
• Helper Layers — auxiliary layers attached to a master for design references, alternate sketches, and comparison overlays.
• Smart Components — component references with parameters. Define internal axes on a glyph and carry alternate layers along them; reuse the glyph at different positions in different hosts.
• Path Decorations — corner and cap components attached to specific outline points. Survives editing, copy/paste, and round-trip through .glyphs and the FontCreator project file.
• Reference Artwork — multiple raster or vector reference images per master, attached to the Masters and Layers panel as layers.
• Curvature Comb, Contour Direction Indicators, Marquee Zoom — new editor visualisations and gestures.
• Pen Tool Shift constraint — hold Shift to constrain the next point to a 45° angle.
• Improved Masters and Layers panel — unified across Windows and macOS, with click-to-edit color swatches, a palette-entry picker on color rows, and consistent toolbar / context-menu actions.

A complete changelog is online at https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator/changelog.

Variable Fonts

Comprehensive variable-font authoring, from the design space outwards:

• Multiple masters along any number of axes — Weight, Width, Slant, Optical Size, or custom axes.
• Smart Components for variation that doesn't need a font-wide master.
• Kink detection — surface and fix interpolation kinks automatically.
• PostScript names on named instances for clean PDF and PostScript output.
• Subsetting — export a subset of axes or a sliced variable font, change default location, extend axis ranges, extrapolate beyond authored extremes.
• Compatibility checks — visual indicators in the Masters and Layers panel for every kind of mismatch (point count, contour direction, start point, transforms, anchors, etc.) plus one-click fixes.
• Export named instances as static fonts in a single batch.

Color Fonts

Authoring for both major color-font extensions:

• COLR + CPAL layered color glyphs, with palettes that re-skin a font without touching glyph data.
• SVG color glyphs, with optional CPAL palettes.
• Multi-palette support — ship multiple color schemes in a single file.
• Click-to-edit color swatches in the Masters and Layers panel.
• Palette Manager dialog (macOS) and docked Palette panel (Windows) for full palette authoring.

OpenType Layout Features

Visual authoring, code editing, and live proofing in one workflow:

• OpenType Designer — visually add, edit, and debug substitutions and positioning rules.
• Automatic OpenType feature generation for common feature sets.
• OpenType code editor — write OTLFD or AFDKO (.fea) syntax directly.
• VOLT import and export — interchange with Microsoft VOLT projects.
• Interactive proofing — see substitution and positioning effects on real text, including complex scripts.
• Existing features preserved when opening a font.

Supports the full OpenType layout-feature spectrum: substitutions (single, ligature, alternate, contextual, chained-context) and positioning (single, pair, mark-to-base, mark-to-mark, mark-to-ligature, cursive attachment).

Anchors, Composites, and Hybrid Glyphs

• Anchors panel — manage attachment points used by Mark and Cursive lookups, ligature carets, and Auto Attach.
• Auto Attach — propagate anchor positions through composite glyphs automatically.
• Complete Composites — generate composite glyphs from base + mark relationships, with thousands of pre-defined definitions and Anchor-Based generation.
• Hybrid glyphs — mix contours and components in a single outline (decomposed automatically on export).

Drawing and Refinement

Tools that act on the outline directly:

• Pen Tool with Shift constraint for clean orthogonal and 45° segments.
• Free Draw tool — left-click to draw, right-click to erase.
• Optimize Contours — remove redundant points without changing the rendered shape.
• Smooth Curves and Smooth and Align Curves — adjust handles for clean curve flow.
• Round XY Coordinates — snap selected points to the grid before export.
• Add Bounding Guidelines, Add Overlap, Extend Corner — quick-access tools for common authoring patterns.
• Boolean operations — Union, Intersection, Exclusion, and Knife on contours, with cubic-curve support.
• Background Layer for non-destructive comparison and Mask subtraction.
• Convert between quadratic (TrueType) and cubic (CFF) outline formats per glyph.

Imagery and Scanned References

• Convert raster and vector imagery — signatures, logos, handwriting — into glyph outlines.
• Reference Artwork lets you load multiple bitmap or vector references per master as layers.
• Single-line / engraving fonts supported: design with open contours and export as Single Stroke or Double Stroke for laser-cutting and CNC milling.

Quality and Workflow

• Validation panel — find and fix common font issues before export.
• Test Desktop Font — preview the active font in any application without installing it.
• Test Web Font — preview WOFF / WOFF2 in the system browser.
• Find and Replace glyph names across the font.
• Glyph Tagging with custom tags and "No Tag" filtering for triage.
• Transform — scale, rotate, skew, mirror individual glyphs or the entire font (for example to derive a bold weight).
• Generate, modify, import, export, and clean up kerning pairs (manual and automatic).
• Unicode variation sequences for typeface variants.
• Glyph subsetting — exclude individual glyphs from any export.
• Vertical metrics for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts.

Scripts and Languages

FontCreator handles the writing systems most type designers work with:

• Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek script families with all common diacritics and accents.
• Complex scripts — Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, Devanagari, and others, with full OpenType layout support for shaping and reordering.
• CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) — including vertical metrics for vertical writing.
• Unicode end-to-end, including the supplementary planes and the Private Use Area.
• All major encodings and code pages.

Platforms

• Windows — full feature set.
• macOS — full feature set; a few editor surfaces are platform-specific (the Palette Manager dialog, native color picker with RGBA and hex input, OS-standard menu placement).

Licensing and Activation

FontCreator is available as a perpetual license or as an annual subscription. Both license types are activated online with a single connection and verified periodically. For perpetual licenses, an offline activation method is available on request, which is useful for air-gapped systems or machines without reliable internet access.