In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the Altsys Corporation to develop graphics applications for personal computers.

[3] Fontographer, developed by von Ehr for the Mac and released in January 1986 — before Adobe Illustrator — was the first commercially available Bézier curve editing software for a personal computer.

[3][4] 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[5]), leading to what has been called "the democratization of type design":[6][7][8] for the first time in history, numerous self-taught type designers without substantial capital investment produced fonts for professional use.

With the PostScript background established with Fontographer, Altsys developed FreeHand in 1988 as a Macintosh Postscript-based illustration program using Bézier curves for drawing and editing.

FontLab, the only serious competitor at the time, was generally considered more difficult to use, although by 2005 it had overwhelmingly replaced Fontographer for most professional font development.