Fontographer is a font editor that was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd.
Fontographer was developed by James R. Von Ehr for the Mac and released in January 1986. It was the first commercially available Bézier curve editing software for a personal computer. This made the development of typefaces cheaper than ever before.
In 1995, Altsys was acquired by Macromedia and Fontographer were incorporated into the Macromedia product lineup. Although development of the font editor was frozen from 1991, when version 4.1 was released, until 2006, many font and graphics designers continued to use it.
In May 2005, FontLab Ltd. announced that they had licensed distribution rights from Macromedia, and resumed development. In December 2005 FontLab shipped a new version of Fontographer for Mac OS, running natively on OS X and featuring numerous bug fixes. In June 2010, Fontographer version 5.0 was released by FontLab. This represents the first major features added to the product since 1996.
