FontForge-20230101

Introduction to FontForge

The FontForge package contains 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.

[Note]

Note

Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.

Package Information

Additional Downloads

FontForge Dependencies

Required

libspiro-20220722 and libxml2-2.13.4

Recommended

Optional

giflib-5.2.2, git-2.47.0, libjpeg-turbo-3.0.1, libtiff-4.7.0, sphinx-8.1.3 (to build html documentation), and WOFF2-1.0.2

Installation of FontForge

First, fix two security vulnerabilities in the Splinefont functionality:

patch -Np1 -i ../fontforge-20230101-security_fixes-1.patch

Next, fix a problem with old translations exposed by gettext-0.22:

sed -i.orig 's/\(%[^%[:space:]]*\)hs/\1s/g' \
 fontforgeexe/searchview.c po/de.po po/ca.po \
 po/hr.po po/it.po po/pl.po po/uk.po po/en_GB.po \
 po/fr.po po/vi.po po/ko.po po/ja.po

Install FontForge by running the following commands:

mkdir build &&
cd    build &&

cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
      -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  \
      -W no-dev .. &&
make

To test the results, issue: make check.

Now, as the root user:

make install

If you have installed sphinx-build, HTML documentation was built and installed in /usr/share/doc/fontforge. To be able to access it as a versioned directory, create a symlink as the root user:

ln -sv fontforge /usr/share/doc/fontforge-20230101

Command Explanations

-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release: This switch is used to create an optimized release without debug information.

-W no-dev: This switch is used to suppress warnings intended for the package's developers.

-D ENABLE_X11=ON: use an X11 backend instead of GDK3 (gtk+-3) for basic Xorg graphics.

Contents

Installed Programs: fontforge, fontimage, fontlint and sfddiff
Installed Library: libfontforge.so and /usr/lib/python3.13.0/site-packages/{fontforge,psMat}.so
Installed Directories: /usr/share/fontforge and optionally /usr/share/doc/fontforge{,-20230101}

Short Descriptions

fontforge

is a program that allows you to create and modify font files

fontimage

is a program that produces an image showing representative glyphs of the font

fontlint

is a program that checks the font for certain common errors

sfddiff

is a program that compares two font files