Sunday, June 7, 2009

FontForge

FontForge

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.
This website itself has been translated into Japanese and the tutorial into traditional Chinese and German .

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 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.

  • No attempt has been made to be efficient.
  • Many type 3 fonts will not be read in correctly
  • Importing a type0 font loses the encoding. FontForge only imports simple type0 fonts (such as those made by itself), will get confused if there's more than one font with a chars dictionary.
  • FontForge's does not support contextual ligatures for Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) fonts
  • There are a number of opentype/AAT tables which FontForge does NOT support.

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.

  • Some truetype fonts (kaiu and mingliu) do not store the correct outline. Instead they rely on using the instructions to move points around to generate the outline. The outline does not appear to be grid-fit at all, just positioned. FontForge does not apply the instructions when loading. In most fonts this would be the wrong thing to do, and I don't know how I could tell when it needs to be done...
  • After adding the Johab encoding 23/Nov/01, any old fonts (in sfd files) which had a unicode encoding will suddenly claim to have a Johab encoding. I don't see a way around this at the moment. Just reencode them as unicode and all should be well.
  • I'm told AutoKern doesn't work too well. (I may have fixed this, but I'm not sure)
  • FontForge is confused by small splines, on the order of one em unit. If you need something that small, scale the font up by a factor of 2 or more (including the ascent and descent).
  • There is a fundamental problem when importing a type3 font (or an eps file). In an most postscript programs each contour is stroked or filled individually, but in a type1 character, all contours are filled together. This can lead to unexpected side-effects if contours overlap. (configuring fontforge for mutlilayered editing can help with this)
  • On linux boxes the dashed lines representing hints or the outlines of references get screwed up. I think this is a bug in the XServer on linux (it doesn't happen on other systems) but I have not examined it closely.
  • FontForge will not copy and paste large (>XServer transfer (4Meg on my machine)) clipboards of text.
  • Under gnome mnemonics in menus don't work. Personally I consider this a bug in gnome.
  • Under gnome, docked palettes don't work the first time. Personally I consider this a bug in gnome.
  • FontForge only produces an approximation to the OS/2 Codepages fields.
  • Some commands don't work well in extreme conditions.
  • ???

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.

  • My writing leaves much to be desired. Anyone who can make my documentation more readable is encouraged to do so. (or who wishes to translate it into other languages, or who wishes to put it into a more flexable format, KANOU has a Japanese version)
  • I also have a brief tutorial in pdf format and in html. This could also be translated into other languages (and would be a simpler job than trying to translate the entire website). The html has been translated into German and Chinese.
  • The UI can be translated into different languages. FontForge now uses gnu gettext. See the section on translation notes for more info.
    • English I take care of
      • (I've even got an en_GB file for those differences I've noticed between British & US spellings, but if anyone with a sharper eye finds other differences, please let me know)
    • Russian is provided by Alexandre Prokoudine, originally by Valek Filippov.
      Last Update November 2008
    • Japanese is provided by KANOU Hiroki. (and has translated the entire website)
      Last Update Jul 2006
    • French is provided by Pierre Hanser and Yannis Haralambous.
      Last update Nov 2007
    • Italian was provided by Claudio Beccari, but I can no longer contact him. This needs to be updated!
      Last update Feb 2003
    • Spanish is provided by Walter Echarri
      Last update Oct 2004
    • Vietnamese is provided by Clytie Siddall.
      Last update Jan 2008
    • Simplified Chinese is provided by Lee Chenhwa
      Last update (July-2008)
    • Traditional Chinese is provided by Wei-Lun Chao at OSSII
      Last update (Aug-2007)
    • Wei-ju Wu has translated the tutorial into German
    • Philipp Poll is providing a German UI.
      Last update (Apr 2007)
    • Michal Nowakowski is constantly updating the Polish translation.
      Last update (Nov-2008)
    • Apostolos Syropoulos is working on a Greek translation
      Last update (Oct-2008)
    • Any other language additions would be great (the entire UI does not need to be translated, any subset is a help), if you are interested see the translation notes here.
  • You can take over a chunk of the code:
    • Michal Nowakowski and Alexej Kyukov have taken over the auto instructor and auto hinter.
  • Different font formats
    FontForge supports Type1, truetype, opentype, cff, type42, cid-keyed and svg fonts, also bdf and NFNT for bitmaps
    FontForge will sort-of accept metafont files (essentially it runs metafont and autotraces the result). It won't produce .mf files
    FontForge will read (but not produce) Ikarus files
    FontForge will read acorn font files with a helper app.
    But there are other formats out there that I can't find descriptions of or don't think are worth supporting
    • Can you point me at documentation for other standards
    • Can you explain why that format is useful?
  • There are certain commands which don't work very well and if someone else wanted to they might code them better than I...
    • Remove overlap (has problems with coincident splines)
    • Expand Stroke (has problems when there are sharp bends near the end of a contour (or near a joint where the slope is discontinuous) -- a sharp bend is one where the radius of curvature is smaller than half the stroke-width)
    • Autokern (might be fixed now)
    • Change Weight & Condense/Extend make assumptions about glyphs that aren't always true.
  • References
    • I'd like to provide a reasonable bibliography, please suggest some good relevant books.
    • Are there any other programs or websites that I should be mentioning?
  • Tests
    • I've have a very simplistic testsuite-- more to weed out crashes in the underlying engine, than to make sure it produces the right results. If anyone has a better idea for an automated suite, or would like to contribute tests to the current stuff, please let me know.
  • QA
    • I don't.
      I find QA boring, and since no one is paying me for this I don't do very much (I generally run it past my testsuite from time to time). This is obviously a problem. If anyone (or several anyones) wants to undertake to do QA for me I'd be delighted (this is a public mailing list).
  • Printing tests
    • I'm always on the look out for short copyright free texts for printing. I'm looking for samples from languages I don't have anything on, or in styles that I don't have.
      I'm also interested in phrases equivalent to "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." (pangrams). These are short sentences which use every letter in the script.
  • Indic information
    • Indic languages have a series of special ligature features in opentype. I believe that FontForge could probably generate some of these by default but I don't know enough to say which. If you are familiar with indic scripts could you give me a list of conversions in a format like 
      U+0066 + U+0069 => U+FB01 'liga'
  • Donate to FontForge

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)

  • Tom Harvey
  • Ken Chilton
  • Gerhard Killesreiter
  • Alexander Kotelnikov
  • University of California, Santa Barbara
    (which has several times let me use some of their machines to do builds and find bugs if I didn't have the requisite system at home).
  • Uwe Koloska
  • Max Neunhoeffer
  • Martin Giese
  • E.J. Neafsey
  • Norvell Spearman
  • Stefan Fendt
  • Harald ?Gleis?
  • Valek Filippov
  • Pasi Eronen
  • Luc Devroye
  • Scott Pakin
  • Robert Brady
  • Dung Ta Quang
  • Sivan Toledo
  • Gerhard Schellhorn
  • MinGyoon
  • Olaf Rogalsky
  • Baruch Even
  • Volker Gering
  • Torsten Bronger
  • Jacob Jansen
  • Ulrich Klauer
  • Andrey V. Panov
  • Edward G.J. Lee
  • Werner LEMBERG
  • KANOU Hiroki
  • Pierre Hanser
  • Claudio Beccari
  • Yannis Haralambous
  • Walter Echarri
  • Wei-ju Wu
  • Huw Davies of CodeWarriors who showed me how to generate a windows fon format.
  • Wei-Lun Chao
  • Sergey Malkin
  • And many others!

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 encourged 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

  • BDF editors
    • gbdfed -- bdf editor
      Formerly called xmbdfed
    • gfe -- GNU font editor. Eventually supposed to support other formats
    • fstobdf -- Part of the X distribution, reads a font from the server and generates a bdf file from it.
  • Postscript/ttf font editors
  • MetaFont -- Knuth's font generation which produces bitmaps from a program based on splines (& other TeX utilities)
    • (available with the TeX package)
    • MetaPost, Uses the metafont language to produce PostScript pictures.
    • MetaType1, Which attempts to generate a type1 font directly from the metafont splines (I think)
    • MetaFog -- Part of TrueTeX (proprietary) another mf->outline converter.
    • TeXTrace, generates pfb fonts from TeX fonts by rasterizing at high res and then autotracing them
    • mftops, similar
    • mftrace, traces pk fonts (bitmap images) and creates pfb/pfa files. (formerly called pktrace)
  • Postscript utilities
    • gfontview -- displays a postscript/ttf font
    • gglyph -- another font displayer
    • t1utils -- Type 1 utility programs & multiple master utilities
    • Type1inst -- helps to install type 1 fonts under X and ghostscript
    • ttf2pt1 -- Converts truetype to type1 postscript fonts and generates hints
    • ttftot42 -- Converts truetype to type42 postscript fonts.
    • type1fix -- (part of the TeXtrace package). Used to make some Type1 fonts work with ATM.
    • my stuff -- Type 1 decoders and converters. True Type & open type decoder.
  • TrueType utilities
  • Other font creation tools
  • Font manipulation libraries
    • RoboFab -- Font library for python
  • Rasterizers
  • Other font tools of mine
    • fondu -- Unwraps fonts from mac resource files (this includes dfonts). Produces ttf, pfb and bdf files for 'sfnt', 'POST' and 'NFNT' resources
    • mensis -- Allows the user much finer control over some truetype tables than is provided by FontForge.
    • showttf -- Dumps the contents of a truetype/opentype font. Does some error checking too.
    • pcl2ttf -- Reads a pcl file (to go to an HP printer) and extracts any truetype or bitmap fonts in it. (the bitmap fonts become bdf files, the truetype fonts become ttf files).
  • font organizers
  • Unicode Font Guide for Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems
  • Other related links...

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

  • DejaVu -- extension of bitstream Vera to cyrillic & greek.
  • Free UCS Outline Fonts -- A set of free OpenType fonts covering ISO 10646/Unicode character set..
  • Computer Modern Unicode -- Outline based version of Knuth's TeX fonts, extended to unicode.
  • JUnicode -- A free (GPL) font especially for scholars working with European medieval texts
  • TypeForge -- a site for collaborative font development.
  • Linux Libertine -- A replacement for the Times font family
  • Open Font Library -- Collecting public domain fonts in one place for easy use
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Posted by webaku at 8:20 AM
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