FontForge install procedures
for unix/linux based systems

Installing from a pre-built package

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I post pre-built packages for i386 linux systems and for Sparc Solaris systems. These can be found on sourceforge's file release system. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using this system, but you get the file eventually.

Obtaining a package from another source

Most of the linux distributions have packages for fontforge. These will often be a little older than my packages, but perhaps more stable. I shall not try to provide a complete list, but I am aware of the following sites:

Installing from an rpm

The i386 package I provide, and many of the linux packages others provide are "rpm" files.

Installing an rpm package is relatively straight forward. You will need to be root. Move to the directory containing the downloaded rpm, and then type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself): 

# rpm -i fontforge-*.rpm

If you've already installed fontforge and are updating an earlier version then you should type: 

# rpm -U fontforge-*.rpm

Installing from an executable tarball

The solaris package I provide is a bzipped tarball (that is, it has an extension of ".tar.bz2"). You will probably need to be root for some of this process. Move to the directory containing the downloaded tarball and type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself): 

$ bunzip2 fontforge-*.tar.bz2
$ tar xf fontforge-*.tar
$ cd fontforge
$ su
# ./doinstall

(Older versions may have an extension of .tgz. In this case you would replace the first two lines with "$ tar xfz fontforge-*.tgz")

Caveat: My packages generally install to /usr/local, and this may not be in your default PATH. You may need to add a line like 

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin ; export PATH

to your ~/.bashrc file (or equivalent if you use a different shell).

Building and installing from source

Obtaining a source distribution

There are two basic ways to obtain a source distribution. One is by downloading an entire source tree from the web, and the other is by using the cvs utility to maintain a source tree on your machine which will be as up to date as possible. The former solution provides more stability, the latter provides access to cutting edge bugs.

tarball

Sourceforge's file release system will contain a tarball (a file with the extension for .tar.bz2).

After you have downloaded one of these packages, either copy the tarball to where you are, or move to the directory containing the tarball (I can't provide explicit instructions here, because I don't know where your browser put the file) and type (The "$" or "#" are example prompts from the computer. Do not type them yourself): 

$ bunzip2 fontforge*.tar.bz2
$ tar xf fontforge*.tar
$ cd fontforge-*

from the cvs tree

cvs is a nifty set of utilities which allows concurrent access to a source tree by many users. To set up your own (local) copy of the cvs tree (including documentation), create a new directory, cd into it and type the following (when it asks for a password, just hit return): 

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge login
CVS password:
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge checkout fontforge
$ cd fontforge

Once you have established a directory you may update it to obtain the most recent version of the source by typing: 

$ cd fontforge
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge login
CVS password:
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs1.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fontforge update

You can also browse the CVS tree online. Or see sourceforge's description for more information (their information is out of date, the correct server is cvs1.sf.net not cvs.sf.net), or read the CVS manual.

Building & installing it

Now you have the source installed on your system and you should be positioned at the top directory of that tree. You need to configure your package (this is a little program that figures out how to use your system), and then build it: 

$ ./configure
$ make

Having done this you will probably want to install what you have built. This should be done as root: 

$ su
password: ******
# make install

More complicated installs

The configure script allows you to turn off and on various features of fontforge that might not be appropriate for your system. Type 

$ configure --help

for a complete list of options. Some of the most useful are described below.

Building fontforge without X

If you don't want to install X11 on your system, you can use fontforge as a command line tool which can execute scripts to manipulate fonts. FontForge's scripting language is described in detail in the section on scripting. 

$ configure --without-x

Building fontforge to edit type3 fonts

If you do want to edit PostScript type3 fonts, you can configure fontforge to give you access to more drawing modes than are generally available in fonts. 

$ configure --enable-type3

Building fontforge to edit device tables

If you do want to create device tables (which allow you to fix up kerning data at a specific pixel size) in OpenType fonts 

$ configure --enable-devicetables

Installing FontForge somewhere other than /usr/local

If you want to install fontforge in a different directory (say in /usr/bin) 

$ configure --prefix=/usr

Installing documentation from the cvs tree

If you have a copy of the cvs tree on your system then you should be able to type 

# make install_docs

Again you will probably need to be root to do this install too. Use "su".

Dependencies (external libraries/helper programs)

FontForge tries to avoid hard dependencies. If a library is missing then fontforge will (in most cases) be able to continue to run, it will just lack whatever functionality the library provides. So if you don't need to import tiff images, you don't need libtiff. If you don't need to hand SVG fonts you don't need libxml2, etc.

If you want to do autotracing around character images you should also download either

If you want to edit CID keyed fonts you need these character set descriptions. (These were last updated 22-Dec-2004)

You might want this addition to FontForge's built in character set encodings. Use FontForge's Encoding->Load Encoding command to add these encodings to the Encoding Menu.

With the appropriate libraries, FontForge can import png, tiff, and gif images to act as character backgrounds for tracing purposes (FontForge can import bmp and xbm formats without external libraries). With libxml2 FontForge can read SVG fonts. With the freetype library FontForge will do a better job making bitmap characters for you. libuninameslist provides standard unicode names and annotations for unicode characters (it has been localized into English and French)

None is required for the proper compilation/execution of FontForge, if the libraries are not present they will not be used. (If the machine on which your executable was build didn't have them, then you must not only install the libraries, but rebuild fontforge from source) If your machine doesn't have them and you want them they are available from:

Normally FontForge depends on the X11 windowing system, but if you are just interested in the scripting engine (with no user interface), it may be built on systems without X (the configure script should figure this out).

Once upon a time, fontforge only used X11 bitmap fonts, on most systems in now uses fontconfig.

There seem plenty of good unicode outline fonts, so I shan't provide any suggestions. To install them you simply create a subdirectory called .fonts in your home directory, and then copy the font file into that subdirectory.

In the old days there weren't many bitmap fonts with good unicode coverage so I provided a list of suggested fonts. That's not nearly as important now. But if fontconfig isn't available for you, you might want to pull down some old unicode bitmap fonts.

To install these, put them in a directory, and in that directory type: 

    $ mkfontdir
    $ xset fp+ `pwd`

You should make sure that the xset line happens whenever X is started on your machine (put it in your .xsession file).

Documentation

The complete fontforge manual is available online.

Installing a documentation tarball

Once you have downloaded the documentation tarball as described above, you should move to the directory containing it, and type: 

$ su
password: ******
# mkdir -p /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge
# mv fontforge_htdocs*.tgz /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge
# tar xfz fontforge_htdocs*.tgz
# rm fontforge_htdocs*.tgz

After doing this fontforge will be able to find the docs on your system when you press the [F1] (or [Help]) key. If you don't do this fontforge will attempt to find documentation online.

Starting FontForge

Notes on the PATH variable

On most systems fontforge will install itself into /usr/local/bin (that's the standard place for optional software), and this is not always in the default search path for commands (grrrr). Which means you might have everything properly installed, but nothing actually works. If you see messages like "fontforge: command not found." this has (probably) happened to you.

So what do you do?

You need to set the PATH environment variable so that it includes /usr/local/bin. The value of the PATH variable is a set of directories separated by colons. 

$ echo $PATH
/home/gww/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/sbin

Unfortunately there are two ways of doing this because there are two different conventions used by unix shells. Type: 

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

If the name of your shell is bash (as above), ksh or sh then you want to type 

$ PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ; export PATH

If the name of your shell is tcsh or csh then you say 

$ setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH

But you'd have to do that every time you logged in. Instead you want this included in the shell's initialization. Again there are two cases, for the bash family of shells you want to edit the file ~/.profile while for the csh family you want to edit the file ~/.login. On a bash system the following command is generally sufficient: 

$ cat >>~/.profile
PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ; export PATH
^D

(where ^D represents control-D, obtained by holding down the control key while depressing d.
And for the csh family you would type: 

$ cat >>~/.login
setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH
^D

Starting fontforge from the command line

$ fontforge font.pfa font2.sfd font3.ttf font4.otf

will start fontforge looking at the fonts you specify on the command line. It can read either pfb or pfa fonts, and some ps fonts (type 0 fonts based on a type 1 dictionary) as well as truetype fonts, open type fonts and many other formats.

$ fontforge -new

will cause fontforge to create a new font (in iso-8859-1 encoding)

$ fontforge

will open up a file picker dialog and allow you to browse till you've found a font file (or have created a new one).

$ fontforge -script script.pe fonts...

This will invoke fontforge in a non-interactive mode, and have it run the named script. Any further arguments on the command line will be passed as arguments to the script and processed (or not) by it.

Reporting Bugs

Please report bugs by sending an e-mail to fontforge-devel@lists.sourceforge.net