Edit or Create Fonts Easily with FontForge

When you are working on a creative project and looking for a special font, then you can visit one of the many fonts download websites and look for the font you want. But its not always that you find the font of your choice. Sometimes we find fonts close to what we have been looking for. A slight modification to that font and we can proceed with our creative project. But how do you edit an existing font? Its very easy – just use the FontForge open source software to edit any existing opentype, truetype or other types of fonts.

FontForge can create new fonts and edit existing fonts to suit your requirements. It can open and save, opentype(OTF), truetype(TTF), SVG,  BMP and other types of files. It works in Linux, Windows and Mac without any problems. It is available both as an installable program as well as a portable software.

FontForge

In order to edit an existing font, you can open it in FontForge and choose one of the letters or characters that you want to edit. That letter is opened in the editor where you can modify its shape using various drawing tools. You can make the font corners round or sharp, make them long and stretched out etc., – you can do anything you wish. In fact, FontForge has a very simple user interface compared to some other font editors and you can quickly learn how to use it.

After you have edited one or more letters from a font file, you can save the file in any font format of your choice, install it in your OS and start using it in your word processing programs like MS Word. If you do not want to install the fonts, then you can use Font Loader to load the fonts temporarily.

Conclusion: FontForge is an open-source font editor with a very simple user interface and does not take much time to get familiar with. It allows creation and editing of all types of fonts including truetype fonts, open type fonts and more.

You can download FontForge from http://fontforge.org/.

4 comments

  1. The problem is I don’t want to save a new font file, I simply want to edit the existing font file without generating a new file. How do you do that?

    1. Save it and delete the old version…

      Once you export the font (‘File’>’Generate Fonts…’) it is literally the old font (i.e. the font you loaded) with all the same data and details, with any changes you may or may not have made to it.

      To make an exact copy of any font (or that font with any changes you decide to make), simply export it in the above-mentioned way, and make sure to select the corresponding Font Format (i.e. TTF, OTF, etc) when doing so.

      You can’t just ‘edit’ a raw font. It has to be loaded into (or, properly, read and interpreted by) a program that reads the format that fonts are stored in (a bunch of numbers and stuff). It’s not just like a picture stored in bitmap (BMP) format, where you can edit the pixels and save it, it’s more messed up than that.

      You have to export a completely new font file each time; replace one, if you prefer. But once a font file is produced, you can’t just ‘twist that little end bit of the T and save’. You make a temporary copy in your computers memory (i.e. in FontForge) and then it puts out a replica of that anew (again, with any changes you might happen to have made).

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