Altsys

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 were:
*Fontographer for Windows - font editor
*Font-O-Matic for Windows - font transformer
*Virtuoso for Windows NT - vector editor

Altsys' best known product that was basically rebranded Virtuoso, that was licensed to Aldus Corporation under FreeHand name, 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 back to Altsys. Altsys also published Metamorphosis for Macintosh, a font utility.

Altsys was acquired by Macromedia in January, 1995. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NEW/is_1994_Oct_28/ai_16187517] Von Ehr became a major Macromedia shareholder and joined the Macromedia board of directors.

External links

* [http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=5707&coll=ap Altsys Metamorphosis] Apple Inc. support article, circa 1990
* [http://www.jkr.gov.my/jln/sbhtm/supply1.htm Softbase] - lists whole Altsys software line for Windows