Fontforge
Version: Git Web: http://fontforge.github.io
Linux has always been superfriendly for desktop environment customisation—it goes far beyond themes and styles in different desktops. However, whatever interface you like you probably can’t live without fonts. Most people stick to one of the default sans typefaces that comes with their Linux distro, but there are more ways of playing with fonts than you might think.
Fontforge is a font editor that enables you to be more creative and not only choose fonts, but also make your own. Fontforge is one of very few applications of its kind for Linux and it’s definitely the most respected and tried and tested. Fontforge has been around since 2000 and despite its age, its still in active development. It also means that the user interface is organised in a quite old-fashioned way (we warned you!). The first time you launch Fontforge, it will ask you to open a font of any supported format. Fontforge boasts a very broad list of formats it can read, including TTF, OTF, Type1-3, SVG, Postscript, BITMAP and even fonts extracted from PDF. If you are not sure where to start, guide Fontforge to /usr/ share/fonts and choose anything you want. There are two main interfaces within Fontforge: the first interface is a character table browser with all symbols contained in a font while the second one is an editor that pops up when you double-click a letter in the browser.
The editor has manipulation tools that us shapes, nodes, selections and other elements of a letter. From one perspective this looks like a custom- tailored vector editor—but you can draw letters right in the Fontforge editor or, if you’re more accustomed to other tools such as Inkscape, you can prepare letters there and transfer them as SVG images to Fontforge and adjust certain metrics. Bringing standalone letters to a font is exciting, but quite complex— you’ll have to deal with kerning, baseline, glyph adjustments and many other aspects in order to create a smooth and good-looking font. Some metrics can only be optimised manually, which is why creating professional fonts can take a long time. But you can always try your luck with simple fonts in Fontforge— it’s easy and a lot of fun.
“Fontforge is a font editor that enables you to be more creative.”