Font editors

A font editor is needed to be able to modify or create fonts. Perhaps the best open-source font editor is FontForge [26], that used to be called pfaedit. FontForge is an outline-font editor, and allows one to create and modify Postscript, TrueType and Opentype fonts. In addition to several outline formats, bitmaps can be generated. Several commercial font editors are also available [27,28,29], but I have no experience with these, nor am I aware if Linux versions are available.

FontForge can be installed in a straightforward manner, as per the installation instructions in the documentation [3]. External libraries used by FontForge [30] should be installed first. Of these, libpng, zlib, libtiff, libungif, libjpeg, and libxml2, were already available from the Redhat 8.0 CDs. libuninameslist was compiled and installed as per the instructions on the homepage [31]. Also, for improved display of fonts, FontForge needs the source code from the FreeType font engine. This is typically not included on Linux distribution CDs, and the source code for the version corresponding to the one installed on your system must be downloaded from the FreeType homepage [18]. One can check what libraries are currently installed, e.g., with,

  rpm -q -a | grep libpng

or,

  locate libpng

Most GNU software, including libuninameslist and FontForge installs with the same configure/make/make install cycle, i.e., download, uncompress and untar the source code, change directory to the one holding the source code, and then, as super-user, type:

  ./configure
  make
  make install

Compilation options can be listed by

  ./configure --help

which in some cases might allow one to tune the options to one's specific system.

The FontForge documentation is also available for download [32]. If installed with,

  mkdir -p /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge
  cd /usr/local/share/doc/fontforge
  gunzip fontforge_htdocs-*.tgz
  tar xf fontforge_htdocs-*.tar
  rm fontforge_htdocs-*.tar