Oh wow, that's great news! ... when will we see FonDTLLab, then?

This agreement may not imply anything for FontLab's own product development. It is notable I think that FL are only going to be selling OTMaster, and not any of the other DTL tools such as KernMaster. OTMaster is a table editing tool, something that has been missing from FontLab's product line, but something that they are aware that people need. Over the years, I've used a number of tools that enabled direct editing of TTF/OTF tables, mostly for post-processing of fonts generated from FL or compiled from VOLT and/or VTT, or for copying tables between different fonts. I have to say that DTL OTMaster is the best of such tools, so this is a smart move on FontLab's part: why expend development effort creating a table editor when someone else has already made such a good one.

Indeed, we've entered a collaboration with DTL in such a way that they of course remain to be the vendor of the software, and in complete control over its development, and Fontlab Ltd. acts as a distributor. It's interesting, because this is the first time where fontlab.com actually sells non-FontLab software.

DTL OTMaster was the obvious choice as the first product to offer, because it's quite self-contained (opens and saves OpenType fonts). So it does not directly fit into any *particular* tool workflow, but can be used with any workflow.

This does not mean that it's the only tool we'll be selling. We are interested in increasing interoperability between font editing applications, so I feel we'll need to do some work in order to achieve that. I for myself certainly would like to make sure that we're making tools available to the users that are easy to work with, and to mix with each other.

I consider this the first step, not the only step.

Importing and exporting UFO files is definitely planned for most if not all new versions of our apps. The more formats we support the better.

Adam,

Two things:

I bought OTMaster 2.00 directly from DTL a few weeks back. What's 2.3 got that 2.00 doesn't? And is the upgrade path for this free? There was no word that an upgrade was imminent on DTL's site when I bought it.

Who wrote the sales copy on FontLab's OTMaster page? I like it. It isn't the usual blah, blah, blah.

rich