Software Review: Font Forge

[Cliff N. Hansen]

It's always puzzled me how there is such a mind-boggling array of user-created fonts you can download, but when I search for programs to make fonts with, the results are always expensive. I doubt all these people are buying—or even pirating these programs. While that mystery will probably remain, I can at least rest well knowing that there is at least one free quality font-making program out there: Font Forge. I've used this program very little, so if you have experience I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I thought I'd get it up here since some of us were talking about it the other day. On Windows, the install process is a bit tediuous and weighty since you have to install CGYWIN which is a Linux-like prompt system, and you run the program through there. That's weird. I want to use Windows OR Linux, but to do both doesn't seem like an effective use of my processor. Anyway, once you can get around the trickiness of installing it, the program looks pretty straight-forward to use. You're dealing with outlines, not bitmapped fonts, so you can potentially make some pretty hight quality ones. The program lets you save as True Type or Open Type. Seems like good stuff. Maybe after I get done with my current book project (and catching up on the African World Cup), I'll get around to testing it out!