FontForge is a typeface (font) editor program supporting several font formats like TrueType, PostScript, OpenType and SVG fonts. It is free software under the BSD license. Fonts created with FontForge are stored in a font-neutral format called "spline font database files" using the .sfd extension. It is available for several operating systems. In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ... TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobes Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. ... PostScript (PS) is a page description language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. ... OpenType is a scalable computer font format initially developed by Microsoft, later joined by Adobe Systems. ... Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated. ... Free software, as defined by Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation, can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed. ... The BSD license is the license agreement that the BSD software (largely, a version of UNIX) is distributed under. ... In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
Among other things, FontForge is used as a basis for the The Free UCS Outline Fonts. A few projects to provide free software unicode fonts, i. ...
FontForge is an outline font editor that lets you create your own Postscript, TrueType, OpenType, CID-keyed, multi-master, CFF, SVG, and bitmap (BDF) fonts, or edit existing ones.
I happened to learn about FontForge by chance just as I encountered a need to use it; I wanted to make minor modifications to an existing set of fonts (modifications allowed by the license; thanks Bitstream!).
It did seem a bit odd that FontForge uses only the base X libraries (no Gtk, no Qt) but despite a few of what I would consider oddities these days (menus work a little bit differently from what I have become used to, for example) I was quickly impressed.
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