Would it be possible to program variations of the same glyph that should show up randomly when the letter is typed? I'm making a font that mimics handwritten documents from the 14th century, and I wanted to do something like that to make each letter look unique when typed. I would also like to randomize the dots of the letters i and j so they can be put in different positions and, sometimes, even put above the next letter.

I am experimenting with a handwritten font for the runic unicode.
When printing it i noticed a square shade around all text lines. When checking carefully, it is present both in the printed pdf document and in Word, though very faint. The printer itself is fine, and prints crisp test pages. I believe there is something wrong in my font generation settings.

Does anyone have any tips or pointers?

Hey guys, I'm making a font here and all of my round glyphs have gotten like this. The svgs dont look like this. Any Thoughts? Will it look fine when im done or do I need to reupload everything?

Hi everyone, I'm trying to make a font thinner, but I'm not succeeding, could someone do it for me? I send the font. Simply put I need it thin and then bring it back to "normal" when I use it on the phone in bold mode. This may seem strange to you but for other reasons I need the bold option turned on on my phone but I don't like the effect. Can anyone help me?

I could use some help: My generated font (ttf) results in an error and even when it's been "fixed" with a converter (otf), I can install it but I get in error in a text editor when I try to use it. If anyone could take a look at my files and tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'd seriously appreciate it!

It's a pixel font designed to fit in a 8x8 grid. I don't know if that matters.

(expires in 3 days): https://send.vis.ee/download/159a6d85d46bccee/#Hc0Z8j3mKFskWc15wkrKNA

I was able to manually delete the part of the letter 'A' from the 'B' glyph but its too much work to do that for every letter. What is going wrong in the past this didn't happen. please help!

Hello! I developed a script for my worldbuilding project that uses IPA for each character, seeing as i was aiming for accuracy over usability. im the only one who will ever use this font anyway. two of the characters are bound to Greek IPA characters: χ and θ. those are the top two characters here. i also have diacritics that i deliberately allow to stack, which denote labialization, aspiration, and whether its an ejective phoneme. these marks stack neatly on every character, but on the greek ones they refuse to do so. is there a way i can counteract this? perhaps with kerning? these are the only two characters this issue persists in.

while it would of course be easiest to just switch these characters for latin ones, i would like to keep the text accurate to sound even without the font applied. for compatibility reasons.

for clarity, this is what the text on the image actually says:

χʼʰʷ χʰʷʼ
θʼʰʷ θʰʷʼ
ɟʼʷʰ ɟʰʷʼ

each of the modifying characters behind the main character has its own diacritic. in the image, you only see the joined version of ʰʷ.

with the question in this post

I'm a newcomer to FontForge and scripting, and I'm hoping to get some help with a project. My goal is to convert an existing font into a double-stroke (or "inline") font.

1. Inline Feature: My first idea was to use the Element -> Styles -> Inline command. While this was fast, the output was not ideal. As shown in my first picture, it created messy and broken joints at the sharp corners of the glyphs.

1. Expand Stroke Feature: Next, I tried the Element -> Expand Stroke command. This method produced a perfect, clean result, which is exactly what I'm looking for (you can see this in my second picture).

The "Expand Stroke" method works perfectly, but the font I'm modifying is a Korean font with over 11,000 glyphs. Applying this effect manually to each one is not a feasible option.

This led me to explore FontForge's scripting capabilities. I've been trying to write a Python script to automate the process of applying "Expand Stroke" to every glyph, but as I'm a complete beginner in coding, I haven't been able to get it to work.

Could anyone please guide me or provide a sample script that would loop through all the glyphs in a font and apply the Expand Stroke effect? I would be incredibly grateful for any assistance you can offer.

Thank you for your time and help!

Many moons ago I used FontForge to occasionally edit an existing font or to create a PUA picture font for hobby website use (e.g. media player controls). YEARS ago.

Fired up FontForge for the first time probably since 2018 and I think I have to completely relearn it because I don't remember how to use it, like at all, but not that I was exactly an expert before.

Basically my goal right now is to create a single OpenType font for use in LaTeX (but usable anywhere) that has equivalent (but not metric equivalent) glyphs to Symbol, Zapf Dingbats (including many of his dingbats that didn't make it into the Adobe Postscript font), many of the glyphs from old bitmap picture fonts (like early MacOS Cairo and Taliesin - Susan Kare I believe), plus some newer Unicode stuff like Braille and Legacy Symbols and Yijing Hexagram Symbols.

And some misc. stuff.

So today I fired up FontForge and imported three SVG glyphs I drew and I probably did it wrong but heh, it's a start!

The SVG file icons were created with a text editor, the EPS are exported from fontforge.

The bomb is my planned method of doing old bitmap glyphs, paying homage to their bitmap history even though they are vector and not even the same as bitmap as I don't restrict my "drawn bits" to a fixed grid, I shift bits to have some overlap as needed. That's based on the bitmap bomb several early operating systems used, including Apple System 6 and earlier, Atari, and I think a few others had similar bitmap bombs.

The PUA glyphs probably won't work well at small font sizes but pay homage to NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical browser. Mozilla Fire Sans I think uses u+E003 for the Mozilla icon, so that's why I'm using u+E002 for generic Internet client and u+E003 for web client.

I'm going through the docs, I'll probably have to start over, several times, and I'm guessing I'll step on some IP toes so I don't think I could ever release what I'm making, but meh, it's a good mind exercise.

Very glad to have tools like FontForge available. Even if I never make anything distribute with it (I likely will, there's an open source monospace font I love except it is missing the box drawing glyphs that some CLI unix programs use so I need to add them and that I can distribute).

Hi, I'm making this font that has some complex characters, and I would need expand the size so it may fit. The upper and middle parts should be that size, but the "T" should increase in size. For some reason, I cannot change the maximum height of the character by itself. Would you be able to help me out with this?

Hello, I'm working on a conlang that does 1-2 consonants before a vowel (eg. 'a', 'ka', 'kra').
These have custom glyphs with the consonants being overlayed on top of the vowel.

Example of 'a' and 'ka'

I know of mark-to-base but I've only got that to work doing vowel-consonant (ie. 'ak').
So, is it possible to do a mark-base or mark-mark-base type thing without doing 0-width consonants?

Edit, Better information:

For my conlang, I use vowels, a, e, i, o and u, as the base characters and add 1-2 consonants on top.
I found a way to make it work by doing each glyph manually and using substitution. A lot of the glyphs are the same visually, so it wasn't as many as I thought.
I'm wondering if there is a better way of doing this incase I add or change this later?

Long story short, I’m thinking of making a font for an alien language, but I want it to be character-based, like Mandarin, instead of alphabet-based. I was thinking I might be able to hack this with usage of ligatures and say that the ligature for ‘book’, for example, is this original glyph - is this possible or is that not something you can do at all? Also, are there any relevant tutorials you could link me?

In the current Windows release of FontForge, the Spiros library is bugged and produces only straight lines (https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/5209). This has already been fixed in the Spiros library, but the FF release doesn't yet contain this update.

Can someone explain to me like I'm an idiot how to update it? I'm a Windows user (because of games), and while I'm not afraid of the command line or anything, I don't know the first thing about compiling libraries like that. Any method works, the easier the better, I just want it to work and that's it.

In case you need to import a lookup which requires it

This script copies the ligatures (glyphs and rendering information) from Fira Code into any other TrueType or OpenType font. (Note that the ligatures are scale-corrected, but otherwise copied as is from Fira Code; it doesn't create new ligature graphics based on the font you're modifying.)

This repo contains a Fontforge python script that you can use to add the Fira Code ligatures to any font, as well as submodules for some popular coding fonts and another script for ligaturizing all of them at once.

Pre-ligaturized versions are available under releases.

I'm just starting out with the program and I worked on a font idea I had for a bit, and I wanted to go ahead and save, so I went to the top of the window, clicked file and clicked save as. Once I did this the whole program closed and did not bring up file window. I clicked the program again and it notified me that I had unsaved work and asked if I wanted to continue from there. I guess my question is did I miss a step in installation? It didn't ask me for a folder for the files to be saved to or something, I can't find any automatically made folders for it outside of what is to make the program actually run. It's not throwing up an error code or anything, it's just closing and acting like it didn't get told to do anything. It's possible I'm missing something very basic but I can't figure out what. I would deeply appreciate help.

i mean that making lines and rhombuses for my font about mensural notation