QUESTION:

I use a Mac and hear that Fontographer won’t run in OSX 10.15 Catalina!? Apple is apparently asking developers to optimize their apps for 64-bit compatibility, so I’m doing the same…

Any chance of a new 64 bit Fontographer?


ANSWER:


Here is the link to the our blog post on this matter:

https://blog.fontlab.com/fontlab/fontlab-studio-5/fls5-fog5-tt3-macos-catalina/

In short, it’s not possible to simply “update” Fontographer to 64-bit.


What Apple sells as an “easy” thing is, in reality, the opposite, especially for apps with such a long legacy as Fontographer, dating back to 1985. It’s not the “64-bit” per se, it’s that huge amounts of the Fontographer code use system APIs from classic MacOS, which in MacOS X are called “Carbon”, and Apple never upgraded Carbon to 64-bit. The removal of 32-bit support by Apple is a nice thing in theory, but in practice, it’ll affect a huge number of software developers. 

Our advice is to postpone upgrading to Catalina if you rely on 32-bit apps, as many users will undoubtedly do. I personally don’t plan to upgrade to Catalina anytime soon, because I myself have lots of apps that would no longer work (not just by FontLab), especially those from smaller developers.

So far, FontLab 7 is our only app that will work on Catalina. 

We’re looking at available options for Fontographer, so keep out for our announcements!