Nice overview about FontForge. I dabbled in it once too. Yes it is a bit clunky, but I have serious doubt that the (commercial) competitors are much better. Not that I know any, not even names.
Also, awesome website! Very quirky, very distinct style.
FontForge is open source, cross-platform and fairly featureful; that is something to be grateful about but I can assure you from first hand experience that yes the commercial competitors are indeed much better. If you have macOS you check out some of those yourself, they have long enough trials - Glyphs(/Mini) and RoboFont. That said I’m most excited about the upcoming generation, for example the web based fontra.xyz etc.
FontForge is cross platform, and I've generally found I can beat the UI into submission easily enough. However the mac builds are a bit of a minefield and they only publish Intel binaries. Trying to DIY an ARM build was an exercise in frustration. They use some seemingly abandoned alternative to Apple's otool, and the whole process depends on Python <= 3.11.
Also open source (but definitely more assertive about asking for money) is BirdFont. I've installed it but not spent much time trying to use it.
Cool summary of FontForge. For creating fonts from handwriting there are, as implied in the article, easier and more automated options. After which you can still tweak the resulting font. https://www.calligraphr.com/en/ (previously called MyScriptFont)
I didn't go too hard into all the optimisations possible with kerning and such, but every software I tried (about 3 or 4) was incredible frustrating, broken or difficult to handle. Might be user error though, and I suspect paid software works a lot better. Applaud you for sticking with it.
What is the simplest way to merge multiple fonts in a single font? VS Code doesn't support fonts by language, token. i.e. I can't set comic sans for comments while using something else for rest. but you can set italic/bold etc.
I've loved fonts since they became a widely used (and arguably overused, for a time) thing in the 80's when "Desktop Publishing" was a thing. It was one of the first things to make me notice how design mattered. Anyway, cool font and great overview
Does anyone ever use MetaFont/MetaPost to create fonts (typefaces)? Does FontForge have any scripting capability? I’ve never used it … only read about it. But I down all 5 “computers and typesetting” books by Knuth
FontForge embeds a Python interpreter [0], which lets you write Python scripts that start with `#!/usr/bin/fontforge` and just `chmod +x` and plainly execute them later on. That said I've only ever personally used it for basic reproducible manipulation of existing fonts with small issues with individual glyphs I wanted to fix, so your mileage may vary depending on requirements.
I wonder if there's an AI wrapper startup working on making fonts. The prompts would be interesting, like "design me a Christmas font that's heavily influenced by the Balkans but also Soviet Brutalism, and make it friendly for Children" or something of that sort.
Culturally it needs to be ok to have exotic fonts used commercially. I understand why Helvetica, Roboto, Noto Sans and the more modern fonts are used, but it makes the world a tad dull TBH
I wonder is there ever going to be a random generator parameter as part of font spec, so we have true handwritten fonts where a letter repeated will not be identical, you know, as if it would be if handwritten.
Back in 1998?9? I modified a Postscript font to introduce some random jiggling[0] to make it look organic. Worked pretty well. Would occasionally go nuts and you'd get carnage but definitely workable for doing, e.g., sheets of address labels for competition entries which would often reject / frown upon "computer-aided entries".
But I think TTF and OTF engines ignore randomness these days and all you're left with is the rotate/swap methods mentioned here[1]
[0] I was just copying the idea off something else I'd seen recently; probably the Beowulf PS font where "each point in each letter in every word on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a shaken, distraught appearance"
You can already do this to a considerable extent, and a couple of handwriting font generators support the notion, but it’s still fairly manual.
In order to do it all realistically, font formats just aren’t the right primitives, and I doubt they ever can be (though… hmm, wonder if the HarfBuzz WASM thing might be applicable): you need something more like stylus data, e.g. a sequence of {x, y, tilt, pressure} for every 5ms, which you can then jitter and vary realistically.
Doing a font, as shown in the post, for the ASCII character range is good for hobbysts. But learning about OCR and how it affect font recognition and accessibility, covering the unicode range decently, and more... Maybe that's what make it for professionals.
Also, awesome website! Very quirky, very distinct style.