BEFORE INSTALLATION
You must insure that you have the the X11 server installed on your system. This process is slightly different on OS/X 10.3 & 10.4
10.4
	• 	I believe the X server is now part of the default install. It lives in the Utilities sub-folder of the Applications directory.
10.3
	• 	The X server lives in a package called X11User on the third install CD.

You may also want to install the fink package which includes many useful libraries (see the dependencies section below for more info on this)

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I post a mac install package on sourceforge's file release system. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using the file release system, but you get the file eventually.
	• 	If you follow the link above you will end up on a page showing many releases of FontForge for many systems
in most cases you will want the most recent release.
	• 	Then click on the executable package you want to download:
	 	The mac release will be called something like "FontForge-200xxxxx.pkg.sitx
	• 	Then you have the joy of choosing a mirror site (pick one that's on the same continent you are) and click on the little icon in the download column
	• 	Then you wait. After a bit you get another copy of this same page. After an even longer time your browser notices that you've started a download.

Installing

Generally your browser will decompress the package after pulling it down, and then start the install process itself.

If this doesn't happen, find the package (it's usually on the desktop) and double-click on it.

The install will request your password (to make sure you have the right to do an install on your machine, and then ask some innocuous questions, and proceed to install.

Notes

FontForge does not conform to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. FontForge never will. Don't expect it to look like a normal Mac Application. It doesn't.

Before you can start FontForge you must start the X11 server. You do this by opening the Utilities sub-folder of the Applications folder and double -clicking on X11. This will bring up a new menu bar, and under the Applications menu you should find an entry for FontForge.

RUNNING
   Before you can start FontForge you must start X11. It resides in the
   Utilities folder of the Applications folder. Double click on it.

   On the X11 menubar is a menu called "Applications". Click on this.
   You should see an entry for FontForge (if you do not, see below). Click on this.
   FontForge will start and provide you with a font-file browser, which
   also includes the ability to create a new font.

If the Applications menu does not contain a "FontForge" entry, you can add one yourself:
	• 	Select Applications->Customize Menu
	• 	Then press the (Add) button in the dialog that appears
	• 	Double click in the left-most section of the blank line which just appeared and then type "FontForge"
	• 	Press the [Tab] key and type "/usr/local/bin/fontforge"
	• 	Press the [Tab] key again and type "f"
	• 	Then press (Done)

RUNNING from the command line
 Before running FontForge you must start X11.
You can start fontforge either from one of the xterms it creates.
$ fontforge -new
 Creates a new font
$ fontforge -nosplash
 (No splash screen in case you have a very slow X connection)
$ fontforge font.pfa font2.pfb font3.ttf font4.otf font4.sfd
 Opens those fonts (sfd files are fontforge's own spline font database files)
$ fontforge
Brings up a file picker dlg.
$ fontforge -script script-file [script arguments]
 Starts fontforge up without bringing up any windows. It will run the script-file
(passing it any other arguments given on the command line) and then exit.

The Control & Option keys must be used for invoking menu items. If you try
to use Cmd-Q (rather than Cntl-Q) you will quit out of X11, and not just
fontforge. In fact this aborts fontforge, rather than quitting cleanly.

FontForge was written assuming a three button mouse. X11 will simulate
this by assigning Option-mouse click to a virtual middle mouse button, and
Command-mouse click to a virtual right mouse button.

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 

BUGS
Please report any bugs to
       fontforge-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

DOCUMENTATION
        http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/overview.html

FONTS UNDER Mac OS/X
 Macintosh fonts live in /Library/Fonts, /System/Library/Fonts or
~/Library/Fonts. On Mac OS/X FontForge can edit .dfont and resource fork      
fonts. On other systems FontForge can only edit Mac .dfonts (the concept
of a resource fork is Mac specific).

(X11 fonts on the mac are completely seperate from the mac fonts.       
they reside somewhere in the X tree).

FONTS UNDER Mac OS/9
 Note Bene: As far as I know FontForge has not been ported to Mac OS/9 (or 8 or 7)

Fonts live in :System Folder:Fonts: They are stored in resource forks, which
means that if you want to work with them you must first wrap them up with 
either macbinary or binhex (Fetch may be used to do either conversion as you
transfer the font to a different system to edit it).