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Comment by riidom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Also worth keeping tabs on MFEK [0] to see when it enters a more complete state. Everything I've seen of MFEK looks very cool.

[0] https://mfek.org/

Zero activity on the repo in 2023... we may need to wait a while.

Sadly :( Fred Brennan tends to be very "bursty" with his activity.

I really like roadmap diagram on that site. It gives a good overview of progress and where work is required, so an order of delivery can be inferred.

Speaking of fontforge, does anyone know how to preview a few paragraphs of text in a font as it's being designed?

A single sentence with a quick brown fox is often not enough.

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