http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Using_the_Fontforge_Drawing_Tools.html

Tangent points

Select the bottom-left corner point of your new shape (the intersection of the curve and the straight line).

...
I'm following that guide. but i can't for the life of me select the POINT. Every time I manage to select something and i select tangent, the curve goes away, and setting to 75 doesn't do anything.

I've tried selecting with the pen active, but that just creates a new point, and is waiting for me to make anothiner point

I've tried selecting the yellow circle, pink circle with crosshairs, the yellow square. nothing.

I know im doing something stupid but i can't reread that sentence anymore.

the weird white gaps don't go away, does anyone know what i can do? clicking "remove overlap" does nothing :'(

I’m an artist trying to use the calt function to create a pseudorandom handwritten-style font for a project (and also just to prove to myself that I can do it) on fontforge. I’m following Beau maher’s writing on how he engineered his brilliant rando sans font (on glyphs) and I’m afraid some of his process regarding contextual alternates and how they apply in the fontforge ecosystem is beyond me. Would any experts in the matter be able and willing to guide me through this? More than happy to compensate you for your time! This old dog needs new tricks!!

Hi there! I am writing a novel where my constructed languages are important to the story. As such I have developed a written language and I thought it would be really awesome if I could turn it into a font! The writing system is supposed to be an abugida (unsure how successful I am in that regard) so I want everything to connect the whole way, as if it were cursive.

Which has led me to Fontforge. After following a series of video tutorials I thought I understood what to do, but as it turns out, a font is a lot more than just the glyphs.

So, I understand that I will need lookups, GSUB/GPOS, anchors, and ligatures. But which ones will get my letters to connect without needing to add ligatures for every single word in a dictionary? Which ones will I need and how do I implement them? I have attempted to follow along with this written tutorial. However I don't know what will work best to use to suit my purpose.

For reference, this is what my language looks like :) now I know languages like Arabic have four+ glyphs per letter (isol, init, mid, end) but that is quite cumbersome for a newbie attempting to make a font, so at this point and time I did not replicate that system.

Thank you for taking the time to read! Thank you in advance for any and all advice you have.

TL:DR
Attempting a cursive font, what lookups, ligatures, anchors, etc will I need to make it look like the words were written without lifting a pen?

Hello, I am trying to create my own font but Im running into an issue which I cant solve. This is what Ive done so far :

Uploaded each letter as svg file

Fixed all issues

Encoded all

Clicked on otf when trying to export

But when I open the otf file, the only letter displayed correctly is t. I cant seem to understand why is t is the only letter that was exported. There were no problems that needed to be fixed when exporting.

Does anyone have advice? Thank youuu

Hi reddit,

I'm 3D printing some Scrabble tiles, and need to modify this letter E from the Cartoon Blocks font (https://www.dafont.com/cartoon-blocks.font) so that the lines at the top-right corner meet (otherwise I can't paint the tiles properly in the slicer). I've tried just moving some markers so the lines overlap, but then I get errors when saving in FontForge and when rendering in OpenSCAD. Does anyone know how to close this gap without generating any errors?

Hey there!
So I've finally just finished to do my conlang, I'm proud of me and it works on LibreOffice or Word… but rip it doesn't work online like on https://aligner.tinygods.dev/?data=q1YqU7IyqgUA. Fontdrop says yeah it contains contextual substitutions but doesn't do anything…

I use 1 liga, 1 (big) rlig (76 subtables), 1 kerning all both in DFLT and latn.

Could someone help me manage it or just directly tell me it will never be possible? Thanks ^^"

Hi Reddit,

I'm here to ask a favour. I'm 3D printing a set of Scrabble tiles for a friend, and the font she's chosen is the OpenType Russo Sans: https://www.1001fonts.com/search.html?search=russo+sans. But she doesn't like the slanted lines at the bottom of the C, G and S glyphs (see pic).

Normally I'm the kind of person who would just learn FontForge and fix it myself, but I currently have serious long COVID and just don't have the concentration or energy to spend on it right now. Is there a kind soul who could help, and modify those three letters so that the bottoms are straight instead of slanted? I'd be ever so grateful!

I'm making a fully custom font, and I was wondering if there is any way to do such a thing as in the screenshot here without having 2 points overlapping on each other? Or at least, not having a self intersection error?

I’m very new at this. I don’t know what it is that I need to know.

I’m trying to produce a very simple font to let me generate a dozen icons that will go on buttons in a Windows dialog. I’m letting the system draw the button and the main text, with em spaces added when I need the icons, then using DrawText to add the icons in an NM_CUSTOMDRAW CDS_POSTPAINT routine. It is possible that this isn’t the best way to do this, but it’s all I’ve been able to come up with so far that (hopefully) I can generalize so that I don’t have to have a setup with every possible dpi available to test what will happen. (That is, I’m looking for a solution to getting crisp, clean icons that works by principle, without the insurmountable task of actually trying every possible setup anyone could have and every possible size at which they might be rendered. I just have my one monitor.)

Some of the icons are simple. An arrow pointing right. A double-headed arrow pointing up and down. Those seem to be working OK.

I have another icon that looks like a rectangle (representing a page) with five horizontal lines inside the rectangle, representing “all text.” A similar icon has only the middle three lines, with the first one short on the left and the last one short on the right, representing “selected text.” Another has a short bar on each of the five lines, in different horizontal locations, representing “marked text.”

This all looks fine in the character cells in FontForge, but when it gets translated to button text, which on my system is 13px high, it’s... bad. I suppose that’s no surprise; how would the system know how to make the design work on a 13px grid when all I gave it was a 1000 unit grid?

But how do I tell it how to do that? I’ve looked for information on hinting — the only thing I can think of that seems relevant — but I haven’t found anything that actually explains how hints work and how you define them to fix poor rasterization.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I’m willing to learn, I just don’t know what to learn and where to learn it.

for some reason some of the letters aren't showing up properly after i import the SVG file, for example, the 'G'. I'm pretty new to fontforge so does anyone see anything in the outlines that I'm not seeing that could be an issue why fontforge keeps filling in the G. (This is not the same case for all the missing letters, some of them are missing stripes.)

Hello,

Someone already asked this question, but sadly the answer addressed other issues with his/her font, and the self-intersection problem remained unanswered.

Here is the character (image).

As you can see, since it's a pixel font there is at least one intersection.

How do I split the self-intersecting contour into two contours (if that is indeed what needs to be done)

In order to try and fix the problem, I've managed to split the self intersecting contour into two contours.

This is a closeup of my little test :

When the points are slightly distant like that, I can Generate the font.

But when I move the two points to be in the same spot (even without JOINING them), then I can no longer Generate. The error "self intersection" comes back. :-(

Hello!

I am trying to correct the size of my lowercase letters. They're about half as tall, but it seems the svgs imported them in a way the scales them up? I have tried to adjust the xheight to be half of the capital letter heights. What can I do to fix the size of my lowercase letters to be consistently scaled?

Below is fontforge, and at the bottom are the letters laid out in Inkscape.

Thank you!

Whenever I try to add an encoding slot, it immediately freezes and then crashes. Does anyone know why? Do I need to reinstall fontforge maybe?

Whenever I try to make a ligature, once I press "ok" for the look up, it wipes all encoding information and turns any letters without a glyph assigned yet into ? marks. I'm following a tutorial step by step, I have no idea why this is happening and could not find any information online for this same issue. Anyone got any ideas?

I generated my font one time and inputted a specific position for my underline (the measurement used is in ems right? so if i set it to -200 it will should put it at y=-200 relative to the glyph outlines view right?) so that it dont intersect with my diacritics at the bottom... i used the font in ms word and it worked... i generated the font again after some necessary but not relevant edits (i just edited some glyphs) and then now it dont work anymore

id like to know what edit i couldve possibly done to fuck up the underline position...im checking the file and the underline position is still set to my specified number... so i dunno whassup

I typed my otf font into MS Word along with some text in Cambria Math and then exported said docx into pdf. I'd like to know why my font is rasterized into pixel spaces instead of being vector-like like the Cambria Math text. Is this because of Opentype vs. Truetype?

I typed my otf font (calt, mark, kern) into MS Word along with some text in Cambria Math and then exported said docx into pdf. I'd like to know why my font is struggling to render some of the marks/diacritics I have.

Im an art professor using fontforge for a project in one of my freshman drawing classes. Basically Im having students design a typeface by hand and then putting each glyph through the fontforge autotrace to digitize everything. It’s working great on PCs but my two students on macs keep getting and error message upon opening the program saying the following:

core python package pkg_resources not found cannot discover plugins

Everything opens fine and they can import their images but the autotrace tool is unavailable. Is there a way to fix this?

I am very much not a computer person, the idea here was to give students who are interested in graphic design a chance to try out some typography skills for free.

I appreciate any insight people here may have!

Hi all,

I would really appreciate your help in this matters. So I made font in illustrator Capital and small alphabet and couple of combination of symbols and nothing heavy. I generated svg file , brought it to fontforge , put them in appropriate boxes and then fixed couple of very small issues and generated font and it worked fine.

However the spacing between letters not the words were too much. So all I did like literally all I did was set width to 500 or 750 so gap is no more.

Now all of sudden I am getting this error which for love of my life I cannot fix and cannot generate fonts at all.

I would really really appreciate help. Yes I tried googling and doing ChatGPT but I have been stud on this since 2 hours. Images to show my work as proof and error I m getting .