FontLab is a font editor developed by Fontlab Ltd., Inc. Since the early 2000s, it has been the dominant software tool for commercial/retail digital font development. This is partly because the once-dominant Fontographer by Altsys ceased development after its acquisition by Macromedia. During Macromedia's merger/acquisition by Adobe Systems in 2005, Macromedia sold Fontographer's rights and code to FontLab Ltd, so FontLab now owns and maintains both of the most popular font editing/development tools. FontLab is available for Windows and macOS. History Originally, there were two separate companies. SoftUnion Ltd of Saint Petersburg, Russia, made the software, under lead programmer Yuri Yarmola. Pyrus North America Ltd, of the USA was formed in 1992 to distribute and market FontLab 2.0 for Microsoft Windows, which came out in 1993 (there was no Mac OS version at the time). Eventually Pyrus bought all the rights to FontLab, hired Mr. Yarmola, and then restructured as Fontlab Ltd., Inc. Today they have a wide range of font editing and conversion tools. The company is distributed, but programming is still done primarily by a Russian team, partly in St. Petersburg, while the company is incorporated in Panama. FontLab's first Mac OS product was FontLab 3 for Mac, in 1998. Since then, FontLab (FontLab Studio for version 5) has been issued for both Mac and Windows. Although initially Windows versions always came first, with FontLab VI, the two versions have become in sync, with simultaneous releases. In addition, FontLab has developed spinoff font editors for specific markets. TypeTool, a simplified version of FontLab Studio, is quite inexpensive and serves as an entry level typeface editor, which is popular with students, hobbyists, and those whose typographic needs are relatively simple. In the past, AsiaFont Studio (or Fontlab Composer) was a more sophisticated version of Fontlab, with special features for editing Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts. These functions are now included in Fontlab Studio since version 5.1. OpenType features for complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, and Thai are not directly supported, but can be added through Microsoft’s Volt. At a time when fonts came in different formats and were platform-specific, FontLab also began to create a line of font creation and conversion utilities. ScanFont, a tool for converting scans and bitmaps of glyphs into vector glyphs was part of FontLab 2, but in the next version it was split off, and became a stand-alone application. With FontLab VI, the ScanFont