I post pre-built packages for i386 linux systems and for Sparc Solaris systems. These can be found on sourceforge's file release system. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using this system, but you get the file eventually.
Most of the linux distributions have packages for fontforge. These will often be a little older than my packages, but perhaps more stable. I shall not try to provide a complete list, but I am aware of the following sites:
The i386 package I provide, and many of the linux packages others provide are "rpm" files.
Installing an rpm package is relatively straight forward. You will need to be root. Move to the directory containing the downloaded rpm, and then type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself):
# rpm -i fontforge-*.rpm
If you've already installed fontforge and are updating an earlier version then you should type:
# rpm -U fontforge-*.rpm
The solaris package I provide is a bzipped tarball (that is, it has an extension of ".tar.bz2"). You will probably need to be root for some of this process. Move to the directory containing the downloaded tarball and type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself):
$ bunzip2 fontforge-*.tar.bz2 $ tar xf fontforge-*.tar $ cd fontforge $ su # ./doinstall
(Older versions may have an extension of .tgz. In this case you would replace
the first two lines with
"$ tar xfz fontforge-*.tgz")
Caveat: My packages generally install to /usr/local, and this may not be in your default PATH. You may need to add a line like
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin ; export PATH
to your ~/.bashrc file (or equivalent if you use a different shell).
There are two basic ways to obtain a source distribution. One is by downloading an entire source tree from the web, and the other is by using the cvs utility to maintain a source tree on your machine which will be as up to date as possible. The former solution provides more stability, the latter provides access to cutting edge bugs.
Sourceforge's file release system will contain a tarball (a file with the extension for .tar.bz2).
After you have downloaded one of these packages, either copy the tarball to where you are, or move to the directory containing the tarball (I can't provide explicit instructions here, because I don't know where your browser put the file) and type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself):
$ bunzip2 fontforge*.tar.bz2 $ tar xf fontforge*.tar $ cd fontforge-*
cvs is a nifty set of utilities which allows concurrent access to a source tree by many users. To set up your own (local) copy of the cvs tree (including documentation), create a new directory, cd into it and type the following (when it asks for a password, just hit return):
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge login CVS password: $ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge checkout fontforge $ cd fontforge
Once you have established a directory you may update it to obtain the most recent version of the source by typing:
$ cd fontforge $ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge login CVS password: $ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge update
You can also browse the CVS tree online. Or see sourceforge's description for more information (their information is out of date, the correct server is cvs1.sf.net not cvs.sf.net), or read the CVS manual.
Now you have the source installed on your system and you should be positioned at the top directory of that tree. You need to configure your package (this is a little program that figures out how to use your system), and then build it:
$ ./configure $ make
Having done this you will probably want to install what you have built. This should be done as root:
$ su password: ****** # make install
The configure script allows you to turn off and on various features of fontforge that might not be appropriate for your system. Type
$ configure --help
for a complete list of options. Some of the most useful are described below.
If you don't want to install X11 on your system, you can use fontforge as a command line tool which can execute scripts to manipulate fonts. FontForge's scripting language is described in detail in the section on scripting.
$ configure --without-x
If you do want to edit PostScript type3 fonts, you can configure fontforge to give you access to more drawing modes than are generally available in fonts.
$ configure --with-multilayer
If you do want to create device tables (which allow you to fix up kerning data at a specific pixel size) in OpenType fonts
$ configure --with-devicetables
/usr/local
If you want to install fontforge in a different directory (say in /usr/bin)
$ configure --prefix=/usr
If you have a copy of the cvs tree on your system then you should be able to type
# make install_docs
Again you will probably need to be root to do this install too. Use "su".
FontForge tries to avoid hard dependencies. If a library is missing then fontforge will (in most cases) be able to continue to run, it will just lack whatever functionality the library provides. So if you don't need to import tiff images, you don't need libtiff. If you don't need to hand SVG fonts you don't need libxml2, etc.
If you want to do autotracing around character images you should also download either
If you want to edit CID keyed fonts you need these character set descriptions. (These were last updated 22-Dec-2004)
You might want this addition to FontForge's built in character set encodings. Use FontForge's Encoding->Load Encoding command to add these encodings to the Encoding Menu.
With the appropriate libraries, FontForge can import png, tiff, and gif images to act as character backgrounds for tracing purposes (FontForge can import bmp and xbm formats without external libraries). With libxml2 FontForge can read SVG fonts. With the freetype library FontForge will do a better job making bitmap characters for you. libuninameslist provides standard unicode names and annotations for unicode characters (it has been localized into English and French)
None is required for the proper compilation/execution of FontForge, if the libraries are not present they will not be used. (If the machine on which your executable was build didn't have them, then you must not only install the libraries, but rebuild fontforge from source) If your machine doesn't have them and you want them they are available from:
--enable-extra-encodings, as FontForge requires Shift-JIS.
| Some of FontForge's commands depend on your compiling
freetype with the byte code interpreter enabled. This is disabled by default
because it infringes on certain
patents granted to
Apple. If you have a license from Apple (or live in a country where these
patents do not apply) then you may enable the interpreter by setting the
appropriate macro in .../include/freetype/config/ftoption.h before you build
the library (see the README.UNX file on the top level of the freetype
distribution).
To enable the truetype debugger, FontForge needs to have the freetype source directories available when it is built (there are some include files there which it depends on) |
| libpng | libtiff | libungif | libjpeg | libxml2 | libuninameslist | freetype | |
| i386 linux builds | 3.1.2.2 =1.2.2 |
3.5 =20011128 |
4.1.0 =4 |
62.0.0 =62 (6b) |
2.5.4 =2.5.4 |
0.0.1 | 6.3.3 =2.1.9 |
| solaris builds | 2 =1.0.8 |
3 =19970127 |
|
6 =62 (6b) |
|
|
|
| Mac OS/X builds | (static) |
|
(static) | (static) | 2.5.0 =2.5.0 |
|
6.3.3 =2.1.4 |
Normally FontForge depends on the X11 windowing system, but if you are just interested in the scripting engine (with no user interface), it may be built on systems without X (the configure script should figure this out).
You might also want to pull down some unicode bitmap fonts that fontforge uses
To install these, put them in a directory, and in that directory type:
$ mkfontdir
$ xset fp+ `pwd`
You should make sure that the xset line happens whenever X is started on your machine (put it in your .xsession file).
The complete fontforge manual is available online.
Once you have downloaded the documentation tarball as described above, you should move to the directory containing it, and type:
$ su password: ****** # mkdir -p /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge # mv fontforge_htdocs*.tgz /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge # tar xfz fontforge_htdocs*.tgz # rm fontforge_htdocs*.tgz
After doing this fontforge will be able to find the docs on your system when you press the [F1] (or [Help]) key. If you don't do this fontforge will attempt to find documentation online.
On most systems fontforge will install itself into /usr/local/bin (that's the standard place for optional software), and this is not always in the default search path for commands (grrrr). Which means you might have everything properly installed, but nothing actually works. If you see messages like "fontforge: command not found." this has (probably) happened to you.
So what do you do?
You need to set the PATH environment variable so that it includes /usr/local/bin. The value of the PATH variable is a set of directories separated by colons.
$ echo $PATH /home/gww/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/sbin
Unfortunately there are two ways of doing this because there are two different conventions used by unix shells. Type:
$ echo $SHELL /bin/bash
If the name of your shell is bash (as above), ksh or sh then you want to type
$ PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ; export PATH
If the name of your shell is tcsh or csh then you say
$ setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH
But you'd have to do that every time you logged in. Instead you want this included in the shell's initialization. Again there are two cases, for the bash family of shells you want to edit the file ~/.profile while for the csh family you want to edit the file ~/.login. On a bash system the following command is generally sufficient:
$ cat >>~/.profile PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ; export PATH ^D
(where ^D represents control-D, obtained by holding down the control
key while depressing d.
And for the csh family you would type:
$ cat >>~/.login setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH ^D
$ fontforge font.pfa font2.sfd font3.ttf font4.otf
will start fontforge looking at the fonts you specify on the command line. It can read either pfb or pfa fonts, and some ps fonts (type 0 fonts based on a type 1 dictionary) as well as truetype fonts, open type fonts and many other formats.
$ fontforge -new
will cause fontforge to create a new font (in iso-8859-1 encoding)
$ fontforge
will open up a file picker dialog and allow you to browse till you've found a font file (or have created a new one).
$ fontforge -script script.pe fonts...
This will invoke fontforge in a non-interactive mode, and have it run the named script. Any further arguments on the command line will be passed as arguments to the script and processed (or not) by it.
Please report bugs by sending an e-mail to fontforge-devel@lists.sourceforge.net