Marks Guide To Font Editor

Mark’s Guide to Using Apple’s Ancient “Font Editor” App In 1984, as owner of an original 128K Macintosh, I was very interested in how to make fonts for it. It came with a set fonts named after cities, like Geneva, New York, Monaco, and Athens. But there seemed to be no way for an ordinary user to make their own fonts. As a graphic designer and aspiring type designer, this was something I really wanted to do. A solution arrived in the July 1984 issue of St. Mac, an early magazine devoted to the Macintosh. There was a short article on the last page saying that you could send $100 (plus tax) to Apple and get a set of disks containing “supplemental software” (i.e., developer tools) including an app called “Font Editor.” This was Not even a custom icon. exactly what I was looking for. So I sent the check. Font Editor, as far as I can remember, had no manual or documentation. By trial and error (and many system crashes), I managed to figure out how it worked. I was able to design a handful of bitmap fonts in preliminary stages. A few months later, Altsys released Fontastic, a commercial bitmap editor for the Mac that was better than Font Editor in almost every way—and that’s where I did most of my bitmap font work. My vision was to sell sets of these fonts like clip art. But after Apple introduced the LaserWriter in…