FONTFORGE(1)

." Copyright (c) 2000-2007 by George Williams (gww@silcom.com). ." Original manual page by Tom Harvey, subsequently modified by ." George Williams. Heavily rewritten and modified to use standard ." -man (5) macros by R.P.C. Rodgers (rodgers@nlm.nih.gov), 23 October 2002. ." Paul Hardy reconstructed the original man page and added output from ." the latest FontForge release.

NAME
fontforge - create, modify, and view font files

SYNOPSIS
fontforge [-allglyphs] [-c string] [-cmap maptype] [-depth pixeld] [-display str] [-lang=ff] [-lang=py] [-help] [-keyboard ktype] [-last] [-new] [-nosplash] [-quiet] [-recover mode] [-script file] [-skippyfile] [-skippyplug] [-sync] [-unique] [-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 Format (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 nothing to recover, then FontForge will produce an open font dialogue box.

If a scriptfile is specified then FontForge will not open the X display, 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 before 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 collection.

-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 arguments 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 required 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 running 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. Execute 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 interpreter.

-dry scriptfile
    Syntax checks scriptfile (dry run). Must be the first option. All other arguments are passed to scriptfile. This option can only be used with fontforge's own scripting language, not with Python.

-c script-string
    Executes argument as scripting commands. Must be the first option. All other arguments are passed to the script.

-skippyfile
    Do not execute Python init scripts when initializing.

-skippyplug
    Do not load (enabled) Python plugins when initializing.

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 FontForge 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://fontforge.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/fontforge/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 license (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 FontForge 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 licenses, 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 developers under the GPLv3.

BUGS
See the FontForge Github Issue Tracker, at https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/.