Asia FontStudio and FontLab are extremely similar, and the similarity is more than skin deep. The interface and basic functionality of both applications are almost identical, a real advantage to someone moving from FontLab to Asia FontStudio. Users of Macromedia’s outdated Fontographer are in for a somewhat steeper learning curve, as both FontLab and Asia FontStudio have a significantly more complex interface that takes some getting used to. As I noted in my review of FontLab, complexity of interface is the price one pays to obtain the raw power of these applications, both of which make Fontographer look like a bicycle in a world of racing motorcycles.

FontLab and Asia FontStudio make Fontographer look like a bicycle in a world of racing motorcycles.

The most important difference between FontStudio and FontLab is that FontLab will allow users to work with only about 5,000 characters per font, while FontStudio will allow access to more than 100,000 characters per font. This difference is significant for users working with Asian (here meaning Chinese, Japanese and Korean, or CJK) fonts, which may contain in excess of 30,000 characters, or for users wanting to work with some of the “super” Unicode fonts that include large blocks of Unicode characters, or even the entire Unicode character set itself (!). While most users are unlikely to create such fonts (a task that requires incredible resources and expertise), there are a number of fairly common situations that require the ability to edit large fonts.

The flexibility of both applications is a real plus for those requiring industrial-strength solutions to font problems.

Most work in Asia FontStudio centers around the Font and Glyph windows, as shown below:

The Font window allows access to all the glyphs that constitute a font in a catalog view that allows easy access to characters. Characters can be sorted and viewed with almost any conceivable encoding, an especially useful feature when comparing character coverage between two fonts. The character identifiers displayed can be set to show Unicode value, character name, various code point formats, or even to show basic metrics information about the characters (especially useful when looking for “problem” characters in fonts).

FontStudio allows access to more than 100,000 characters per font.

The Glyph window is where characters themselves are edited. Like FontLab, Asia FontStudio has a good set of drawing tools, although users accustomed to Adobe Illustrator will need to spend time to become comfortable with FontLab’s tools. Asia FontStudio’s drawing tools are capable of most common font-editing tasks, although those wishing to be more “artistic” may want to work in Illustrator. When I reviewed FontLab 4.5, I found that I was able to copy outlines from FontLab and paste them into Adobe Illustrator, but that I could not copy outlines from Illustrator into FontLab. This made use of Illustrator with FontLab essentially impossible. I am pleased to report that in both FontLab 4.6 (an update to the version I reviewed) and Asia FontStudio, pasting outlines from Illustrator now works flawlessly, allowing Illustrator to be used for any tasks that FontLab and Asia FontStudio may not be able to handle.

CJK characters are set in relation to the center of a box, rather than to an imaginary line upon which characters rest.

Another important difference between Asia FontStudio and FontLab is that the Glyph window in Asia FontStudio is optimized for working with Asian fonts, but still retains all the Roman script capabilities of FontLab. The differences are important for proper CJK typography since western typographic concepts like baseline and x-height do not apply to CJK fonts. CJK characters are set in relation to the center of a box (called a bounding box), rather than to an imaginary line upon which characters rest. The following screenshot indicates Roman typographic guides in dark blue and CJK-specific guides in red.

These guides help identify the optical center of the bounding box and allow precise alignment to CJK standards. Without these guides, the task of editing would be much harder. While it would be possible to create similar guides in FontLab, having them appear by default is very handy. Since CJK fonts generally contain Roman characters (and often Greek and Cyrillic as well), the availability of both Roman and Asian layout guides is an important feature. Properly situating non-CJK characters with respect to the bounding box assures that they will appear in proper relation to surrounding text.

I was very impressed with the performance of Asia FontStudio.

The relationship between CJK and Roman text leads to one reason why companies or individuals might need Asia FontStudio: the Roman characters in most Asian fonts are of fairly low quality. While Adobe and other vendors have released fonts that help rectify this situation, a great many beautiful CJK fonts are marred by horrendous Roman design. Many users would want to replace unattractive Roman glyphs with those from another font, either for simple aesthetic concerns, or because they need to use a “company” font. Most Asian DTP software packages recognize this need and allow users to create “composite fonts,” fonts that draw on different source fonts for Roman, kanji (Chinese characters), kana (Japanese syllabic characters), ruby (smaller characters used to indicate pronunciation or other vital information), and so forth.

Many common applications, especially ones not specifically made for Asian markets, do not support composite fonts, however; for such applications the only option is to build a custom font containing the proper characters that any application can access. Asia FontStudio makes this task easy, and characters can be copied and pasted en masse. After characters are imported the Transformation Panel can be used to adjust position and other features of large groups of characters to make sure that they appear correctly. (Note that licensing restrictions on fonts may not allow users to extract font data or build composite fonts. Make sure that you have the legal right to alter fonts before using Asia FontStudio to do so.)

For 99% of font-editing situations, Asia FontStudio will meet users’ needs with power to spare.

Adding ruby characters or replacing other specific character ranges is similarly easy, but the application would be enhanced by easier ways to perform common tasks. For instance, it would be nice if wizards were available to automate common tasks, such as adding Roman characters from another font, or creating common ruby characters. Wizards would certainly help occasional or novice users to be more productive with the program. That said, however, Asia FontStudio has the same Python scripting capabilities as FontLab, and scripting these actions should be fairly straight-forward. The flexibility of both applications is a real plus for those looking for industrial-strength solutions to font problems specific to their needs.

Asia FontStudio is truly the heavyweight champion of font editors.

One feature of both Asia FontStudio and FontLab that I liked very much is the Font Map Panel, which provides an easy way to move around a large font with a simple graphical interface that shows where characters occur in the font’s code space. This feature is especially useful when navigating fonts with tens of thousand of characters. A screen shot of this view is shown below (each blue dot represents a defined character in the font):

I was very impressed with the performance of Asia FontStudio. Large CJK fonts all loaded almost instantaneously on my 876 MHz Apple G4, a slow machine by today’s standards, and all commands and actions were snappy and responsive. Having used Fontographer for years, I was used to performance lags on even small fonts and simple tasks, so the speed and efficiency of Asia FontStudio really stands out as a strong point of the application.

My only real criticism of the program is that its power makes it somewhat difficult to learn and use. As with FontLab, more tools aimed at helping novice users accomplish common tasks would be useful, but this criticism should not deter those serious about working with fonts from buying Asia FontStudio. Asia FontStudio is really not a difficult program to use, but it is one that requires reading the manual.

Overall, Asia FontStudio is a professional and very capable package. The documentation is forthright in listing the application’s limitations, but the average user will not run into them. For 99% of font-editing situations, Asia FontStudio will meet users’ needs with power to spare. If all you need to do is occasional tweaking of simple fonts, or tasks such as format conversion, I would recommend that you look at some of FontLab’s other applications, but if you are serious about editing complex fonts, there is no other alternative that comes close to Asia FontStudio. This review has only scratched the surface of Asia FontStudio’s tremendous capabilities, but a full review of all its features would be book-length. Asia FontStudio is truly the heavyweight champion of font editors.

Asia FontStudio is available from FontLab Ltd. for USD 1,999 for both Macintosh and Windows. Upgrades from previous versions are USD 399, and cross-grades from FontLab 4.6, FontLab Composer and Macromedia Fontographer are USD 1399. Note that Asia FontStudio requires a USB hardware key to function.