New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
FontForge: mysterious and confounding? What would you like to know?
Posted by cuttlefish in
12 Nov 2012 — 2:18pm
12 Nov 2012 — 2:18pm
I'd just like to get a finger on what puzzles folks in the type design community about FontForge. Does anything seem inherently difficult? Are functions that should be routine or easy poorly documented? Tell me what's on your mind. :)
User login
Support our Sponsors
13 Nov 2012 — 3:56am
Do you know if it is possible to get the "ShowTTF" tool working with a FontForge installation on a Mac?
13 Nov 2012 — 5:18am
The greatest puzzle are MM-fonts!*
Difficult and hard to understand are mark and mkmk features (they work but are sorely complicated)
* don't work on winXP
13 Nov 2012 — 11:12am
Fontforge's "change width" works much much poorer than the general "change glyph" command. I know neither should be used in professional font producing but, well, doesn't it sound strange?
It's also puzzling that the magical command "change glyph" isn't accessible in scripting.
18 Nov 2012 — 12:28pm
The user interface feels clunky and weird and it doesn't use the normal Mac or Windows UI on those platforms. It is in effect user-unfriendly because it doesn't run under and use the normal OS interfaces. That wouldn't deter me if I found it otherwise compelling, but there wasn't anything that made me think I should use it over FontLab Studio.
An application such as Glyphs has a much more persuasive story, IMO.
18 Nov 2012 — 2:36pm
Installing it.
18 Nov 2012 — 10:41pm
Basic keyboard support is non-standard. FontForge recognizes the backspace key but not the PC "delete" key.
Font file types are handled inconsistently - for example, a CID file's 'font information' is a menu selection under CID, but other file types' are under a separate 'Element' menu. No real biggie, but typical of a techie-programmer approach to user interface. I know - I used to be one!
23 Nov 2012 — 12:03pm
Installing could definitely be easier. The instructions in the current documentation on fontforge.sf.net just don't work. There are some good instructions for Linux installation that actually do work at http://openfontlibrary.org/en/guidebook/how_to_install_fontforge with links to instructions for other platforms from there.
24 Nov 2012 — 9:43am
Steps to install fontforge, the short version:
In Linux:
Install dependencies, configure, make, make install. Most distros have a package called "fontforge", anyway.
In Mac:
Install Macports/Homebrew/Fink, use whatever the package manager to install a package called "fontforge".
In Windows:
Download the fontforge-cygwin from somewhere, unzip and use.
It's not all that hard to install fontforge. But working with it without experiencing crashes is a lot harder.
24 Nov 2012 — 10:00am
Windows: http://www.mpetroff.net/software/fontforge-windows/