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The IKARUS program, sold in North America by URW America (1-800-229-8791), runs on large UNIX systems and is for high-production environments. IKARUS M is a subset, for the Macintosh. There was, long ago, an IKARUS B which ran on DOS computers, but it has not been sold nor supported for many years. I may have the only IKARUS B system left in the world. The Macintosh program, IKARUS M, like all the IKARUS family, is for artists who create their letters with pen (or brush) and paper before digitizing. From sized original drawings you digitize using a digitizing tablet. It is totally unsuited to freehand drawing on the screen. Of all the font creation programs I have seen, the IKARUS products are the only ones optimized for point-by-point digitization from artwork. As a port from UNIX, its bare-bones functionality will offend many Mac enthusiasts. Its interface is almost un-Maclike; many of its proofing and conversion features are rudimentary. It nevertheless does a crackerjack job of getting artwork into IK format, and does a good job of converting IK to Mac and Windows PostScript and TrueType fonts. It has weakeness there, though. You cannot, for example, edit hints. Kerning values can be imported only by a kind of voodoo. I believe its autohinting is superior to Fontographer's, though, especially the way it autohints TrueType. Its documentation of the digitization function is first-rate, and a good primer on the mechanics of digital type design. Its documentation of other functions, however, is minimal. The only other program I use is Fontographer, which is useless for digitiztion, but which lets you put a scanned bitmap in the background and trace it (by hand if you want fast, accurate work, or by autotracing if you want time-consuming, sloppy work). Having experimented with both, I recommend IKARUS hands-down for working from drawings, even at a shocking $500 or so for the software (digitizing tablet extra). Once you're used to it, it really cooks.