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FontLab is a welcome addition to the professional type designers toolbox.  It has plenty of advanced features to please the most discriminating font developer and craftsman, while also providing an easy to learn and use interface which
makes font creation accessible to the beginning designer as well. Pyrus North America is exclusively devoted to creating tools for type design and has given a lot of attention to incorporating features that greatly
facilitate the font creation process, including several features sorely missing in the main competing product, Macromedia's Fontographer.. Since only these two products
currently exist in this market niche, it is unavoidable to review one without direct comparison of features.I found one of best new (and essential) features in FontLab to be the
dockable toolbars. There are separate toolbars for the application window, the font window-where the entire font is displayed, and for the glyph editing window-where the individual characters are edited. There
are the typical Windows buttons for the common actions, such as new, save, and open, and also application specific buttons to toggle on and
off the different views or layers: outline, preview, grid, guidelines, nodes, control handles, bitmap template and mask layers. In the font and glyph windows there are more buttons to access the font information menu;
move forwards and backwards through the character set; access the selection, drawing and transformation tools; zoom in and out; and the always essential undo and redo buttons.
The layout grid and adjustable guidelines are another great feature. You can set global & local guidelines (they are in different colors from the
grid and the baseline and side-bearings, thankfully, unlike in Fog) and you can even set diagonal guidelines! Wow, this alone is reason to switch for me.
The font information menu, where one sets the font names, style, copyright, embedding permissions, and more, is arranged in a set of tabbed menus with clearly labeled text fields and radio buttons. You can
even have it generate the various names and other data automatically after filling in a few basic fields. This is a vast improvement over Fontographer with its arcanely-labeled and buried menu selections.
You can open and edit Type 1 and TrueType fonts as well as create one from scratch. The font window has the option of displaying a small bitmap of each character in the  empty or undefined slots so you can quickly locate the character you want to create and don't have to squint at the label of the character slot. You
can, of course, adjust the size of the display of the slots as well. You may also cut and paste or drag and drop characters from place to place and even from font to font.
On the downside, when you are ready
to create a new glyph, you must double-click to clear the sample bitmap image from an undefined slot and then double-click again (or right-click & choose edit from the fly-out menu) to open a glyph window
for editing. This could certainly be simplified. Once in the glyph edit window, the '*next*' button takes you to the next defined character and not to the next character in the encoding. When
building a new font, you must switch to the font window and double-click, double-click, which significantly slows the creation process. I've asked for a second forward button to remedy this situation. In the meantime, I
work around this effectively by clearing all the bitmaps for the range of characters I want to create before opening a glyph edit window, then I can move through them quickly with the next button.
FontLab comes with a great set of transformation filters which can be applied to a single character, a range of selected characters, or the whole font, with just a click or two, instead of hours of meticulous
hand-tweaking. Particularly fun are the shadow, 3D rotate and 3D extrusion filters and one humorously called college, which creates an outline/inline version reminiscent of college letter sweaters. There is
also a unique envelope filter, which deforms the glyphs to fit into your choice of a set of predefined shapes. All of the filters allow you to tweak their parameters for all kinds of custom effects and to preview them
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