FontForge celebrates fonts as a work of art, and it highly encourages beginner and advanced typography designers to share their creative work. Promotional sentence aside, however, what should be known about FontForge?
Forging Fonts with Purpose and Fun
I think it’s interesting to note that thousands of people are downloading fonts every month. As representations of the creator’s individual genius, all fonts out there are extremely diverse—although not all are good quality and free.
FontForge isn’t only about merely creating and modifying fonts for the purpose of doing so. FontForge wants users to remember that playing with fonts is fun! Users can convert the fonts from one format to another and generate information from the font file. It’s all down to free downloadable and open-source font editing software that’s good-quality and accessible on many operating systems. As a platform embodying those, FontForge is perfect for your next design project!
Design with FontForge Guidebook
Advanced designers probably can skip reading the FontForge guidebook before starting the app, but beginners will absolutely love this addition on their website.
The guidebook is made available to basically assist users with the nook and crook of every type of design process in FontForge. Considering how type design is visually technical and complex, FontForge prepares a set of toolsets with the constant improvement that users can all find in the book.
Besides this book, users can also refer to the FAQ section. For any bug found in FontForge, users can search the issue tracker on GitHub or report it directly to FontForge. A mailing list is available for more further questions if you’re still stuck after rummaging the documentation and web searches.
FontForge is available for macOS, Windows, and GNU+Linux. I’d like to, however, encourage people to use Linux/Unix. FontForge also provides the source code under a libre license. Kindly note that FontForge isn’t a commercial product and isn’t bound by market constraints.
My experience using FontForge is that it can use a significant amount of memory, which is why I want to remind you to prepare your computer first before diving into it. It’s all because, in general, fonts are stored in a super-compact representation. Font formats come in a small and easily rasterized form. However, FontForge expands them into a more intuitive format upon loading, making it much easier to edit.
If you encounter problems on this or whether your system keeps crashing because FontForge keeps running out of memory, I suggest you refer to their FAQ section directly since it can be too technical to be explained here. Nevertheless, FontForge is one of the finest font editing software out there. I highly encourage you to give it a shot!
Main Features
- A free and open-source font editing software
- Compatible with most computer systems
- Comprehensive guidebook and FAQ section should users experience confusion or technical problems
We hope our review on FontForge above can help shed some information on the software! Let us know what you think after you use it, okay?
