FontForge

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FontForge
Fontforge inuse.png
FontForge's user interface
Developer(s) George Williams
Stable release 20110222 / February 22, 2011; 11 months ago (2011-02-22)
Development status Active
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Font editor
License BSD license (Free software)
Website http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

FontForge (formerly known as PfaEdit[1]) is a full-featured font editor which supports all common font formats. Developed by George Williams, FontForge is free software and is distributed under the BSD license.[2] It is available for several operating systems and is localized in several languages.

Contents

[edit] Features

FontForge is "an extremely powerful software system offering practically all the features of FontLab, together with some unique and often revolutionary features of its own."[3]

To facilitate automated format conversions and other transformations, Fontforge implements two scripting languages: its own legacy language, and more recently Python.[4] FontForge can be built as a Python module to be loaded from Python scripts.[5]

Fontforge supports Adobe's OpenType feature file specification (with its own extensions to the syntax).[6] It also supports the unofficial Microsoft mathematical typesetting extensions (MATH table)[7] introduced for Cambria Math and supported by Office 2007, XeTeX and LuaTeX. At least one free OpenType mathematical font has been developed in FontForge (see below).

FontForge uses FreeType for rendering fonts on screen.[8] Since the November 15, 2008 release, FontForge can use libcairo and libpango software libraries for graphics and text rendering[9] providing anti-aliased graphics and complex text layout support.

FontForge can use Potrace or AutoTrace to auto trace bitmap images and import them into a font.

Parts of FontForge code are used by the LuaTeX typesetting engine for reading and parsing OpenType fonts.[10]

[edit] Supported formats

FontForge's native "spline font database" format (.sfd file name extension) is text-based[11] and facilitates collaboration between designers, as difference files can be easily created. The software supports many other font formats and converts fonts from one format to another. Supported font formats include: TrueType (TTF), TrueType Collection (TTC), OpenType (OTF), PostScript Type 1, TeX Bitmap Fonts, X11 OTB bitmap (only sfnt), Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF), FON (Windows), FNT (Windows), and Web Open Font Format (WOFF). FontForge also exports to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

[edit] Free fonts developed with FontForge

[edit] See also

Portal icon Free software portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ "The history of the development of FontForge". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/ff-history.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  2. ^ FontForge main page, license
  3. ^ Haralambous, Yannis (2007). Fonts & Encodings (1 ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. p. 444. ISBN 0596102429. 
  4. ^ "Writing scripts to change fonts in FontForge". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/scripting.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  5. ^ "Writing python scripts to change fonts in FontForge". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/python.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  6. ^ "FontForge's implementation of Adobe's Feature File syntax". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/featurefile.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  7. ^ "MATH typesetting information". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. 2007-08-04. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/math.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  8. ^ "Building FontForge from source". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/source-build.html#Dependencies. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  9. ^ "Change log for FontForge". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/changelog.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  10. ^ "LuaTeX — Taco Hoekwater, July 24, TUG 2008" (PDF). http://www.luatex.org/talks/tug2008-taco-luatex.pdf. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
  11. ^ "Spline Font Database File Format". Fontforge.sourceforge.net. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/sfdformat.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 

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