And, while I was not able to use 1.0 as a production tool, the scenario changed completely when version 1.5 came to light. I am a user of InDesign since its inception. This way, FontLab Studio 5 is still fully functional in both newer Windows and macOS - except the new 10.14.4, of course. Unhappily, they provided no solution for that (nor we found a workaround). But, as I stated above, you can still copy glyphs between fonts using drag-and-drop. The clipboard problem is caused by a change Apple made in macOS.

I acknowledge that this comparison is not entirely fair, Adobe being a far larger company than FontLab and thus able to devote more resources to legacy products, but it still seems to me that support for FLS5 (at least the Mac version) was dropped prematurely. The clipboard bug in FontLab Studio, on the other hand, came to light while FontLab VI was still in public beta, so FontLab effectively dropped support for it’s older, more mature, product before its successor had even been officially released - a situation which I don’t recall seeing before where a major application is involved. And (as Mark Simonson’s post reminded me) the first several versions included a PageMaker plugin kit designed to ease the transition between the two by providing a more familiar interface.

PageMaker, however, continued to be updated into early 2004, so there was over four years of overlap between the two products. InDesign 1.0 was released in late August of 1999. I think everyone would admit that InDesign is a superior product but, for those who remember InDesign 1.0, many of its more advanced features were severely hampered by the fact that it still lacked many features found in the more mature PageMaker. As such, we’re moving from a mature product (FLS5) to a product which, while having a great deal of potential, is still very much in its infancy and still has lots of kinks to be resolved.Ī comparable case would be the transition from PageMaker to InDesign. While it may have been released as “FontLab VI”, I tend to think of the new version as “Victoria 1.0” since FontLab VI is really an entirely new program rather than an upgraded version of an existing one. I know I’m not going to change any minds here, but I just wanted to briefly comment on the above. Although we do not plan any updates to FontLab Studio 5 (it having been replaced by FontLab VI over a year ago)

Fontlab studio 5