This is part of the old website, it is no longer updated.

FontForge is a free font editor for GNU+Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

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FontForge -- An outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats.

FontForge's user interface has been localized for: (English), Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Greek, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, German, Polish, Ukrainian and Catalan.
This website itself has been translated into Japanese and the tutorial into traditional Chinese and German . Translations are often out of date, I fear.

I have no one to do QA for me except users on the net, so this is essentially (and eternally) beta software. Expect to find bugs. Please let me know when you do (this is a public mailing list).

License

Copyright © 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011 by George Williams

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

This is essentially the "revised BSD license".

Mailing Lists

There are currently three mailing lists established for FontForge. You may subscribe to any of them on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=103338. You may not post to a list until you have subscribed (sorry about that, but we were getting too much spam).

Caveat: Posting to these mailing lists exposes your email address.

Lacks

FontForge is by no means perfect. And probably has some bugs. Be prepared to save frequently and consider working on a copy of the original.

Bugs

O, don't the days seem lank and long
When all goes right and nothing goes wrong,
And isn't your life extremely flat
With nothing whatever to grumble at!

Princess Ida, Act III, W.S. Gilbert (& Sullivan)

This list includes the gross bugs that I'm aware of but don't know how to fix. Minor bugs get reported to me and are generally fixed within a week and rarely appear on this list.

Reporting bugs...

I'm sure you'll find some. If you can isolate it and come up with a reproducible minimal case, that would be great. If your executable has symbols in it, you could run it in gdb and get a stack trace... Give me a test case if possible. Do what you can.

Please post bugs to:

 fontforge-devel@lists.sourceforge.net (this is a public mailing list)

Post large testcases to:

 fontforge-testcases@lists.sourceforge.net (this is a public mailing list)

How else you can help.

Acknowledgements

The sample text in File->Print comes from many sources.

The following people have helped debug fontforge. Many thanks! (actually the list should be far longer than this, but as time goes on there are just too many people to thank)

Michal Nowakowski in Poland and Alexej Kryukov of Moscow State University have taken over TrueType and PostScript autohinting and are doing a far better job than I could have.

Ben Weiner from Reading provided the banner image of blocks of real type. The type face is Imprint, created by Monotype (UK).

I owe David Turner (and everyone else) of FreeType a debt for providing an API which allows me to debug truetype instructions. Also he came up with the name "FontForge".

FontForge was inspired by AltSys's Fontographer now rescued from MacroMedia by FontLab. Godfrey DiGiorgi encouraged me to buy my first copy of Fontographer in the mid-80s.

My father inspired a general interest in typography (though he is interested in renaissance printing techniques rather than computers).

And finally I owe thanks to Linda Dozier, David Cole and everyone at NaviSoft which company has given me the free time to write this program.

Related Tools

If you know of a tool you think should be on this list, please let me know (this is a public mailing list). I did my research a couple of years ago and expect it is out of date.

Open Source font development efforts

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