Yes, I know Font Proofer, and Peter and I know each other. We actually talked about font proofing back in 2020, before his app had shipped or had a name. I’d already bought fontproof.com in 2018 (around when I made idiotproofed.com) with plans to build a proofing tool there, and that came up in our conversation at the time. So the name wasn’t a riff on his. It’s the domain I’ve owned since 2018, redirecting to idiotproofed.com until now.
I get the confusion concern, and there’s no bad blood on my end. Peter and I are already in touch.
Hmm, I dunno. I understand that you may have had a domain before FontProofer, but not sure that really excuses creating a very similar product to his, launching it after his is well established, and then deciding to use such a similar name. It just doesn’t feel great to me in a community as tight as ours. The type world is so small and generally mutually supportive, stuff like this stings more than it would if you were making an alternative to Figma or InDesign and sticking it to the big man. Peter is just one guy who had a great idea, built it, and is now trying to get by with a few loyal users.
But hey, I am not as directly affected as he is. I’m glad you’re in touch.
That’s great news! Just curious, what is the “major baggage” that comes with developing for macOS 12? I’ve never made an app so I have no clue about any of that.
Older macOS versions are missing a bunch of the newer tools Apple has added since, so supporting macOS 12 means writing fallback versions of things that just work on newer systems, plus testing on old machines or VMs because stuff renders and behaves a little differently there. It’s more code to maintain and more places for bugs to hide. Seems like quite a few requests for 12 + 13 support and since Glyphs supports all the way down to 12, I’ve decided to as well.
To me, it’s just that Font Proof and Font Proofer names are so wildly close. With a niche space so small, it’s going to create some confusion.
No lie, at a quick first glance, I thought Font Proof was actually Font Proofer’s latest upgrade. Essentially, folks will google search one and land on the other or recommend one and might’ve meant the other. Like Stephen said, Peter’s actively put years into this and it would be a shame if things were muddied by the overlap. Hopefully there’s a way to make some distinction moving forward.
Variable axes: yes, that’s already in. Add a variable font and it gets a slider for each axis (weight, width, optical size, etc.) right in the Fonts panel. You can dial any instance and the proof updates live, and you can even duplicate the same font to compare two axis settings side by side on one page.
Text engine: Font Proof renders with CoreText, Apple’s native text and shaping engine, through a real PDF pipeline. So what you see matches native macOS rendering and the font’s actual OpenType behavior (shaping, features, kerning). It is not Adobe’s engine, though, so it won’t perfectly predict InDesign. InDesign uses its own composer with different line breaking and justification, so paragraph composition can differ even when the glyph shaping looks the same.
I also think the name and url being so close to Peter Nowell’s Font Proofer will create confusion. I’ve been a longtime user of Font Proofer and it’s an extremely useful tool with so many thoughtful features. Based on what I can see, parts of your tool look very similar and replicate features that have been in Font Proofer for years.
You may have owned the domain before Font Proofer launched, but that’s not the same as already having a competing business. If it were me, I’d want to differentiate my product as much as I could. I hope you change the name so users won’t confuse these two products.
Thank you Stephen, and to everyone who’s reached out. It means a lot.
Seeing a tool this close to Font Proofer (including work I demoed at ATypI last year) under a name this similar really stopped me cold. Font Proofer is the creative project I’ve poured the most of myself into—six and a half years of late nights and many thousands of hours. To me it’s always been a long-term commitment to this community, not just a product I shipped. Seeing it reflected back at me was a real shock.
Just so the record is honest: Jake and I have exchanged a couple messages recently, but “we’re in touch” shouldn’t be read as me being ok with this (or previously aware of it). I’m still hoping the two of us can sit down and just talk it over.
In the meantime, I’m still building Font Proofer and I’m so excited about what’s coming next.
I’ve been waiting for a tool like this long time since I’m avoiding Adobe tools for design testing. Font Proofer would be an option of course, but I don’t like the subscription model. I also prefer to pay 300€ once and get a good tool. I will test Font Proof during the next days.
Just circling back to the forum to let everyone know that Font Proof is now Hellbox. It took a little bit to get things staged and switched over. From Idiotproofed to Hellbox – Hellbox
Some other updates:
Works with Glyphs 4 beta
Beta support for:
Live reload for RoboFont 4 and FontLab 8 (no plugins necessary)
macOS 12+ support (dm me if you want to help test and I will comp you a license after your trial runs out)
And a bunch of other improvements that can be found in the release notes
Same license, same .fontproof files, updates arrive as normal!
