FONTFORGE(1) General Commands Manual FONTFORGE(1)
NAME
fontforge - create, modify, and view font files
SYNOPSIS
fontforge [-c string] [-cmap maptype] [-depth pixeld] [-display str]
[-lang=ff] [-lang=py] [-help] [-keyboard ktype] [-new] [-nosplash]
[-recover mode] [-script file] [-sync] [-usage] [-vc class] [-version]
[fontfile ...]
DESCRIPTION
FontForge will read PostScript (pfa, pfb, ps, cid), OpenType (otf),
TrueType (ttf, ttc), Macintosh resource fonts (dfont, bin, hqx), Scaled
Vector Graphics (svg), TeX bitmap (pk), Glyph Bitmap Distribution For-
mat (bdf), and X11 bitmap (pcf) fonts. Font files may be compressed
with gzip (for example, myfont.pcf.gz). FontForge will also read its
own format: Spline Font Database (sfd) files.
If the argument list contains a font file name (or several), fontforge
opens a fontview window for each font displaying the characters of that
font. In the absence of options or arguments, the program opens a
file-picker window, allowing you to browse your disk to find a font
file, or create a new one.
This manual page is intended only as a rudimentary overview; see the
HTML Users Manual for more complete information.
If no fontfiles are specified, and neither is -new, and there is noth-
ing to recover, then FontForge will produce an open font dialogue box.
If a scriptfile is specified then FontForge will not open the X dis-
play, nor will it process any additional arguments. It will execute the
scriptfile and give it any remaining arguments
If the first argument is an executable filename, and that file's first
line contains "fontforge", then it will be treated as a scriptfile.
OPTIONS
-new Creates a new font.
-last Loads the last sfd file closed.
-recover none|auto|inquire|clean
Control error recovery. none suppresses crash revcovery.
auto performs automatic recover if the program crashed be-
fore saving changes; this is the default. inquire asks
what to do with auto-saved crash recovery files. clean
deletes recovery information.
-allglyphs Load all glyphs in the 'glyf' table. of a TrueType collec-
tion.
-nosplash Suppress display of the splash screen.
-quiet Don't print non-essential information to stderr.
-unique If a copy of fontforge is already running, open all argu-
ments in it and have this process exit.
-display display-name
Employ the X display specified by the string display-name
(for example: localhost:0).
-depth pixeld
Attempt to employ a visual that matches the specified pixel
depth, pixeld.
-vc val Sets the visual class if possible.
-cmap current|copy|private
Sets the type of color map. current attempts to allocate
colors int he current (shared) color map. The program will
likely not find everything it requires. copy allocates
what can be allocated, then copies the current color map;
it can thus make use of cells other programs are using.
private creates a new color map and fills it with the re-
quired colors.
-dontopenxdevices
In case that fails.
-sync Syncs the display, debugging.
-keyboard ibm|mac|sun|ppc
Generates appropriate hotkeys in menus. Use ibm on an IBM-
compatible PC. Use mac on a Mac computer running Mac OS.
Use sun on a Sun workstation. Use ppc on Power PC Mac run-
ning SUSE GNU/Linux.
-usecairo=yes|no
Use (or not) the cairo library for drawing.
-help Displays a help message and exits.
-docs Displays help file output and then invokes a browser using
the BROWSER environment variable.
-version Prints the version of fontforge and exits.
-lang=py Use Python for scripts (may precede -script).
-lang=ff Use fontforge's legacy scripting language.
-script scriptfile
Executes scriptfile. Must be the first option (or follow
-lang). All other arguments are passed to scriptfile. Ex-
ecute the script named file. Does not open the X display.
This must be the first argument passed to FontForge. Any
other arguments are handled by the script file itself. Any
other command line arguments will be passed to the script.
The program contains a command interpreter, which allows
access to most but not all of its interactive features. If
a script file is executable, and if its first line contains
the string "fontforge", then the argument -script may be
omitted. This means that FontForge can be used as an in-
terpreter.
-dry scriptfile
Syntax checks scriptfile (dry run). Must be the first op-
tion. All other arguments are passed to scriptfile. This
option can only be used with fontforge's own scripting lan-
guage, not with Python.
-c script-string
Executes argument as scripting commands. Must be the first
option. All other arguments are passed to the script.
EXAMPLE
Sample usage:
fontforge myfont.ttf &
ENVIRONMENT
BROWSER
Specifies the name of a browser program for examining online
documentation.
AUTOTRACE
Specifies the location of the autotrace program. Usually Font-
Forge can figure this out without help, but not always.
MF Specifies the location of the metafont program.
FONTFORGE_VERBOSE
Turns on verbose mode in scripting. Each statement is printed
as it is executed.
FILES
~/.FontForge/autosave
Crash recovery directory.
/usr/share/fontforge/*.ui
Translations for user interfaces.
/usr/share/fontforge/doc/*.html
Optional location for online documentation.
/usr/share/fontforge/*.cidmap
"Encoding" files for Adobe's cid formats, from http://font-
forge.sourceforge.net/cidmaps.tgz.
SEE ALSO
sfddiff(1)
The HTML version of the FontForge manual, available online at:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/.
NOTE
FontForge used to be called PfaEdit.
AUTHORS
FontForge is Copyright © 2000–2014 by George Williams, and is currently
maintained by the FontForge development team. See /usr/share/doc/font-
forge/AUTHORS for a comprehensive list of contributors.
LICENSE
FontForge is licensed under GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
(http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html) with many parts covered by a BSD li-
cense (http://fontforge.org/license.html). Please read the LICENSE
file included in the FontForge distribution for details, or see
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/blob/master/LICENSE.
FontForge is available as a whole under the terms of the GNU GPL
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html), version 3 or any later version.
However, almost all of its parts are available under the "revised BSD
license" (http://www.law.yi.org/~sfllaw/talks/bsd.pdf) because Font-
Forge was mostly written by George Williams, using that license.
The Revised BSD License is very permissive, and allows for code to be
combined with other code under other licenses.
There are many useful libraries available under copyleft libre li-
censes, such as the LGPL and GPL, which FontForge started to use in
2012.
For example, Pango and Cairo are available under the LGPL.
Some features added since 2012 are licensed by their individual devel-
opers under the GPLv3.
BUGS
See the FontForge Github Issue Tracker, at https://github.com/font-
forge/fontforge/issues/.
2017 Jun 18 FONTFORGE(1)
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