FontForge install procedures
for cygwin under MS Windows

I no longer provide pre-built packages. You may either compile from source or download a package from another site (cygwin has a fontforge package).

Installing from a pre-built cygwin package

Before you install

You must insure that you have cygwin installed on your system. Cygwin is free. (cygwin makes MS Windows look enough like unix to allow fontforge to run there). Getting all the bits of cygwin seems to be the hardest part of installing fontforge -- probably because it is the least expected part.

First download the setup.exe program from http://www.cygwin.com/
Run it. It will ask you what components of cygwin you wish to install
You will need the default stuff, plus the X window system, binutils, libpng, libjpeg, and libxml2.
Most of what you need you get by default. But you must explicitly request X11 and the libraries.
Once you have cygwin installed, start it. This should give you a terminal window running bash (a unix shell)

Alternatives to cygwin.

There are now alternatives to cygwin.

Someone has ported fontforge to mingw, which is much simpler to download than cygwin:

fontforge-mingw

Instead of downloading cygwin you can install one of the virtual machines (or something similar) which run linux, and then install fontforge from a linux package.

andLinux

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I used post a cygwin install package on sourceforge's file release system. Old versions are still there, but they are out of date now. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using the file release system, but you get the file eventually.

If you follow the link above you will end up on a page showing many releases of FontForge for many systems
in most cases you will want the most recent release.
Then click on the executable package you want to download:
- The cygwin release will be called something like "fontforge_cygwin-200xxxxx.tar.bz2
Then you have the joy of choosing a mirror site (pick one that's on the same continent you are) and click on the little icon in the download column
Then you wait. After a bit you get another copy of this same page. After an even longer time your browser notices that you've started a download.

Installing

I have no idea where your browser put the package you have just downloaded. This is unfortunate as I can't tell you exactly what to do next. But find the package (often it's on the desktop) and then move it into C:\cygwin\home\<username>. (where <username> is whatever name cygwin gave you)

Then open a cygwin window (by clicking on the cygwin icon)
With luck you will now be in the directory containing the package you downloaded.

Now type (do not type the "$"):

$ bunzip2 fontforge_cygwin-*.tar.bz2
$ tar xf fontforge_cygwin-*.tar
$ cd fontforge
$ ./doinstall

Then each time you want to run fontforge, start X11
- On recent cygwin systems you may start X by invoking:
```
C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat
```
- Or:
```
startx
```
- While on older systems try:
```
$ xinit
```
- This should bring up X in a large window that covers the screen and within that should be a subwindow, an xterm, running bash.
- From the xterm you first start a window manager
```
$ twm &
```
- And then you should be able start FontForge.
```
$ fontforge -new
```
Notes

Caveat: cygwin has a different approach to the file system than Windows. A filename like C:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf will be called /cygdrive/c/windows/fonts/arial.ttf under cygwin (backslashes are replaced by slashes, and the initial drive "C:" becomes "/cygdrive/c".
Similarly a cygwin filename "/home/<username>/myfont.ttf" becomes "C:\cygwin\home\<username>\myfont.ttf"
Caveat: Do NOT try to install a font by using fontforge to write the font directly to the Windows\Fonts directory. This doesn't work. Windows needs to do some magic when installing a font that it can't do if fontforge writes directly there. Instead have fontforge create the font somewhere else and then use Windows' own drag & drop technique to move the font from there into Windows\Fonts.
Caveat: I've been told that on Win 98 you need to have "Microsoft Network Login" installed to run X. I never found this to be true myself, but if you have problems it might be something to try.