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842466 · Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:01 pm Post subject: FontForge

Hello all. I'm new here, and I want to know how difficult FontForge is? From what I've come across the general consensus is it's difficult to use. I have an alphabet I'd like to make into a nice font. Any comments welcome.

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 7:13 pm Post subject:

Welcome! I will warn you, the board is very very quiet at the moment.

I don't have much experience with FontForge, but I can tell you that if your script works any differently from Roman letters you'll almost certainly encounter things you can't do or things you have to make a workaround to do. Of course, you'll probably have to do that with any font program (unless you can hack out a way of piggybacking on Devanagari or Hangeul or something).

Zearen Wover · Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 42

I use fontforge, and I don't find it difficult at all. There's a little learning involved since you have to do all the splines yourself, but it doesn't take long to pick up. I will warn you that it is best to use it under Linux, because it segfaulted in cygwin all the time for me. There are a lot of powerful features in the program, so it seems complex at first, but this is akin to photoshop. You will quickly learn what features you need and which can be ignored.
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842466 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 1:47 am Post subject:

Thanks for the replies. I'm using a Mac and I downloaded the program. It doesn't open up like a regular program where you double-click on an icon and it starts. Apparently I need to use another program called X11 as an interface. Argh! I've got some learning to do Confused

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I'd Rather Be Conlanging Than Working

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 12:51 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I was taking a look and it seems like it is explicitly designed for Linux (much to the consternation of us Windows users), so you have to download and compile the source code yourself (and possibly run it on a Linux emulator thing like cygwin), if you don't have Linux on your machine.

That part's probably the bit that you heard was inconvenient, not the actual program itself.

842466 · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 12:56 am Post subject:

Yeah. Unfortunately I won't have time until the weekend to play around with it.
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I'd Rather Be Conlanging Than Working