Altsys Corporation was a Texas-based software company founded by James R. Von Ehr II. It was an early Apple Macintosh developer and publisher.
Three major products from Altsys for PC / Macintosh and NeXT were:
Fontographer for Windows and Mac OS - font editor
Font-O-Matic for Windows - font transformer
Virtuoso for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Solaris - vector editor (a version was announced, advertised and demonstrated for Windows NT,[1] but never released)
Altsys' best known product was basically a rebranded Virtuoso licensed to Aldus Corporation under the FreeHand name,[2] was a vector drawing program that competed with Adobe Illustrator. It was published for many years, originally only on the Macintosh, then also for Microsoft Windows. When Aldus was acquired by Adobe, the licensing agreement that Altsys had with Aldus precluded FreeHand from being part of the deal, so the publishing rights reverted to Altsys. Altsys also published Metamorphosis for Macintosh, a font utility.[3]
Altsys was acquired by Macromedia in January, 1995.[4] Von Ehr became a major Macromedia shareholder and joined the Macromedia board of directors.
^Willett, Shawn (31 May 1993). "Users Praise NT's Graphic Support at Comdex". Infoworld.
^MacDougall, Paul (5 May 1994). "Software makers' merger gives rise to lawsuit from competitor". Folio.[dead link]
^"V2.1 type library on CD-ROM". Graphic Arts Monthly. 1 August 1991. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. Retrieved 17 February 2013.
agreement that Altsys had with Aldus precluded FreeHand from being part of the deal, so the publishing rights reverted to Altsys. Altsys also published...
with Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand was returned to Altsys by order of the Federal Trade Commission. Altsys was later bought by Macromedia, which released...
Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems announced a merger with Altsys' business partner, the Aldus Corporation. Altsys was the developer...
was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd. In December 1984, James R. Von Ehr II founded the Altsys Corporation to develop graphics...
(Freehand, Aldus's competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was licensed from Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.) By 1998 PageMaker had lost much of professional...
result, Macromedia acquired Free Hand in 1995 from its original developer, Altsys, and continued its development through 2004. The difference in strengths...
by Rogue Entertainment were developed on NeXT hardware using id's tools. Altsys made the NeXTSTEP application Virtuoso, version 2 of which was ported to...
of SimCity that was built with HyperLook. A commercial drawing program, Altsys Virtuoso, was produced for NeWS; it was a port of FreeHand with additional...
illustration program, FreeHand, which was licensed from Fontographer developer Altsys. FreeHand competed directly with Adobe Illustrator, which had been released...
Merged to form MacroMind-Paracomp Paracomp Merged to form MacroMind-Paracomp Altsys Acquired by Macromedia MacroMind-Paracomp Merged to form Macromedia iBand...
Other commercial programs were released for NeXT computers, including Altsys Virtuoso—a vector-drawing program with page-layout features, which was ported...
FontLab 7 can now open recent Fontographer files directly.) Fontographer by Altsys, another independent font development tool, ceased development after its...
published the specification for the Type 1 font format. Retail tools such as Altsys Fontographer (acquired by Macromedia in January 1995, owned by FontLab since...
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