The software was initially developed by the company SoftUnion Ltd. of Saint Petersburg, Russia, under lead programmer Yuri Yarmola.

In 1992, Pyrus North America Ltd. was formed in the United States to distribute and market FontLab 2.0 for Microsoft Windows which released in 1993.

TypeTool, a simplified version of FontLab Studio, is designed as a budget, entry-level typeface editor, which serves simple features for small projects.

OpenType features for complex scripts like Arabic, Devanagari, and Thai are not directly supported but can be added through Microsoft’s Volt.

With the release of FontLab VI, the ScanFont functionality was again integrated into the main application.