Download Glyphs for Mac

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Glyphs is a professional Mac application for creating and editing OpenType fonts. It handles everything from a new typeface to tweaking an existing one, and it plays well with the rest of your workflow — exporting to PNG, SVG, PDF and even SFSymbols for Apple platforms. The interface is clean enough to stay out of the way while you work on spacing, kerning or glyph shapes, and there’s an extension system if you need to add custom tools. It runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 12 or later.

For a working photographer who also dabbles in type — maybe you need a custom logotype for a client or a clean set of numerals for a wedding album — Glyphs gives you the control without the bloat. It’s not a toy, but it doesn’t pretend you’re a full-time type foundry either.

How Glyphs stacks up against other Mac font editors

If you’ve looked around for Mac font editors, you’ve probably come across FontLab and FontForge. They’re the two names that keep turning up, and each takes a noticeably different approach.

FontLab is the heavyweight. It has been around for years, it runs on Mac and Windows, and it comes with a sprawling set of features — things like advanced OpenType feature coding, batch processing and a scripting environment that’s powerful but dense. The trade-off is that the interface can feel like a control panel for a space station. You spend a chunk of time learning where everything lives before you can get into the rhythm of making letters. Glyphs, by contrast, is Mac-first and Mac-shaped. The interface is pared back, with toolbars and panels that appear only when they’re relevant. If you’re used to how macOS apps behave — drag and drop, contextual menus, system fonts just working — Glyphs feels natural from the first session.

FontForge is open source and free, which makes it tempting. It does genuine font editing work, and it’s been used to produce real typefaces. But its interface is showing its age. Menus are deep, the drawing tools aren’t as precise, and it doesn’t handle variable fonts or colour fonts without workarounds. On an Apple Silicon Mac, you often need to run it through a compatibility layer, and the experience shows. Glyphs is native on ARM, so it uses the Mac’s screen rendering and font engine properly. For someone who earns a living with their Mac, that difference shows up fast when you’re zoomed in on a curve at 400 per cent.

Then there’s RoboFont, which is more of a scripting environment than a visual editor. It’s powerful if you write Python code to generate or modify glyphs, but it’s not aimed at people who want to draw letters by hand or adjust spacing visually. Glyphs has a Python scripting layer too, but you don’t need it to get work done. You can do everything through the interface, and the script support is there when a repetitive task needs automating.

For graphic designers who need a custom logotype

Type designers are the obvious audience, but Glyphs really shines for people who make type as part of a broader creative practice. Graphic designers who need a custom logotype or a handful of display characters for a branding project will find it more approachable than the big pro apps. You can draw a letter, adjust its sidebearings, check it against the rest of the alphabet and export it as a working font file in an afternoon. That’s hard to do in FontLab without weeks of learning the interface, and FontForge makes it fiddly to get the spacing right.

Illustrators who want to turn hand-lettering into a usable typeface will appreciate the tracing and interpolation tools. You can scan your lettering, import it as a background layer, and draw vector outlines over it without the app getting in the way. The contextual text editing feature is a quiet hero here — you can type a block of sample text and see how your font behaves in real sentences, which catches spacing problems before you export.

Photographers who sometimes need a bespoke wordmark for a client or a set of numerals for an album layout will find Glyphs less intimidating than a full type design suite. The learning curve is gentler, and the app doesn’t assume you already know how to kern a font. It walks you through the basics if you let it, and the clean interface means you’re not fighting the tool while you figure things out.

How to avoid drawing glyphs at the wrong size

One thing newcomers tend to do is draw glyphs at the wrong size. In Glyphs, the font coordinate system is based on a standard UPM (units per em), and if you draw your letters too small or too large, they won’t align properly with the baseline or cap height. Beginners often draw a single 'n' that looks fine in isolation, then add an 'o' and an 'a' and realise nothing matches. The fix is to set up your guidelines — baseline, x-height, cap height and ascender/descender lines — before you start any drawing. It takes two minutes and saves a lot of redrawing.

Another mistake is ignoring spacing until the end. Kerning and sidebearings are what make a font readable, not just the shapes of the letters. I’ve seen people spend days perfecting a lowercase 'g' and then wonder why the word 'gallery' looks uneven. Glyphs gives you a live text preview panel, so you can see your font as you adjust spacing. Use it early and often. Adjust the sidebearings of a few letters, type a test word, adjust again. It’s faster to do it as you go than to come back and kern an entire character set later.

Beginners also tend to overcomplicate the export step. They try to generate every possible font format at once — OTF, TTF, WOFF, SVG — and then get confused when some files don’t work the way they expected. For your first font, pick one format. OpenType TTF works everywhere on Mac and Windows, and most web projects will take WOFF2. Export that, test it, then worry about other formats later.

Turning a hand-drawn 'Flour' sketch into a clean wordmark

Let’s say a client wants a logotype for a bakery called 'Flour'. They’ve sketched three letters — F, l, r — by hand and want you to turn them into a clean, usable wordmark in about half a day.

Start by scanning or photographing the sketches and importing them into Glyphs as background images. Create a new font project and set up your guidelines: cap height at 700 units, x-height at 500, baseline at 0. Adjust the UPM to 1000 if the default is different. Place your background layer and lock it so you don’t accidentally move it.

Draw the 'F' first. Use the pen tool to trace the main vertical stroke, then the crossbar. Keep the curves smooth and the corners consistent. Once the outline is closed, check the sidebearing widths — you want a bit of space on the left and slightly less on the right, because the next letter will sit next to it. Then draw 'l' and 'r' in the same way. Do not draw 'r' as a scaled-down version of something else; it has its own proportions.

Open the text preview panel and type 'Flour'. Look at the space between F and l — it will probably be too tight. That’s where you adjust the left sidebearing of 'l' or the right sidebearing of 'F'. Do this until the word reads naturally. If the 'r' feels crowded against 'u', adjust that pair too. You’re not doing full kerning for a whole typeface, just for the letters you’ve drawn.

Once you’re happy with the spacing, add the remaining letters for 'Flour' — o, u — using the same stroke weight and style. You can copy the 'l' and modify it for 'u' if the shape is close enough. Adjust sidebearings again for the full word.

Export the font as an OpenType TTF file. On your Mac, double-click the .otf file and install it. Open a document in your layout app, type 'Flour' in the new font, and check that the spacing and shapes hold up at different sizes. If something looks off, go back to Glyphs, tweak the glyph or the sidebearings, re-export and reinstall. It takes a few rounds, but each one gets tighter.

For a logotype this simple, you can usually finish the whole thing in a single session. The client gets a working font file they can use in any application, and you’ve only needed one Mac app to do it.

New this release

• Build 4.1.1 (4108) — release notes dated 2026-09-12.

Mac it needs

• macOS 12 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel processor