Fontographer, developed by von Ehr for the Mac and released in the fall of 1986 "before Adobe Illustrator" was the first commercially available Bézier curve editing software for a personal computer. High quality fonts in the PostScript format could be developed for a fraction of the cost of all other existing methods (URW's Ikarus required systems costing over $100,000), leading to what has been called "the democratization of type design": for the first time in history, numerous self-taught type designers without substantial capital investment produced fonts for professional use.

In January 1995, Altsys was acquired by Macromedia. A new version of Fontographer was included in the Macromedia Graphics Suite, which helped its wider adoption. Although development of the font editor was frozen since 1998, when version 4.1 was released, many font and graphics designers continued to use it. The only serious competitor at the time, FontLab, was generally considered more difficult to use.

RoboFog was a version of Fontographer 3.5 with an embedded Python interpreter, developed by Just van Rossum, Petr van Blokland and Erik van Blokland.