Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor | Hacker News Reader

Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor

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101 pointsmicroflash18 comments

I think every professional type designer I know uses this software.

I have trouble coming up with any other example of total domination of a market segment. Maybe Photoshop in its glory days, or Quark Xpress before that, but even in those cases, there were alternatives in (minor) use.

Plenty of alternatives to Glyphs. FontForge and Robofont both come to mind.

please find me a single professional font designer who uses FontForge. just one.

I use FontForge because I'm a pleb hobbyist without a Mac, but it's like comparing yachts and life rafts.

You're a hobbyist...yet you know what individual software all other type designers use? That is impressive ;)

again, you can easily prove me wrong by finding a single professional font designer who uses FontForge as their daily driver.

It’s certainly a Herculean task, not because there aren’t *type designers who use FontForge, but because there are simply too many of them for me to even consider speaking for them all. However, I’m game.

Raph Levien (Inconsolata), source: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata/about

That may not be the strongest example. https://github.com/googlefonts/inconsolata:

“Building the family

Family is built using Glyphs, fontmake and gftools post processing script. Tools are all python based.

To install all the Python tools into a virtualenv, do the following:

  python3 -m venv venv
  source venv/bin/activate
  pip install -r requirements.txt

To build the fonts we must load sources/Inconsolata-vf.glyphs in Glyphs and do the following:”*

I'll leave it to you to find a better example.

Fontographer and later Fontlab were totally dominant, and they still have a huge market share.

Microsoft Excel after 1-2-3 (the previous dominator) and before Google Sheets? Word after WordPerfect (close to dominant) and before Google Docs? PowerPoint before Keynote?

It’s possible you have a small sample.. I have not noticed “total domination” myself. The type foundries I know and sometimes work with are split. Many use RoboFont. FontLab is less common, but there are some shops that have invested in it deeply enough they’re still using older versions, even. And others develop their own tools, like Fontra, to better address challenges in CJK type design

RoboFont is deeply tied to the Type & Media program at KABK in the Hague. And it has a long history, building off what came before - it is both font software and pedagogy. My memory on this isn’t perfect but I believe Glyphs and RoboFont were both proposals around the time the UFO spec was being formalized

Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop are unquestionably dominant in their own markets.

Yes, there are alternatives. Yes, there are people using the alternatives. No, the alternatives do not hold any meaningful percentage of the design software market.

Adobe sucks but no alternative comes even close to Photoshop and Illustrator.

That's because Adobe acquires competitors who suck less than Adobe.

The reason is immaterial, the point still stands.

Yes, my point (ie: that Adobe sucks and has to acquire its rivals to survive) is immaterial to your primary point (ie: there are no alternatives to some Adobe products).

I suspect you know some Adobe history already - like that a couple decades back Macromedia's product suite was set to overtake Adobe's. Others here may not. It's good for them (regardless of your primary point) to know that Adobe buys its competition.

The point I made in my comment was only material to (and in agreement with) the point you made in passing: Adobe sucks!

The Mrs. is a font designer. I've been watching her and her Discord type design cohort master this software while putting up with all it's quirks and bugs and issues.

It's wild to me that such a tiny team builds a tool as useful as this and nobody has ruined it in anyway yet.

Still no new Glyphs Mini, though. :(

Quality Mac software

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