New: FontForge Portable 2012-07-31 (outline font editor) Released

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on January 2, 2013 - 2:42pm

logoFontForge Portable 2012-07-31 has been released. FontForge is an outline font editor letting you create and edit postcript, truetype, opentype and other fonts. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Platform. And it's open source and completely free.

Update automatically or install from the portable app store in the PortableApps.com Platform.

Features

ScreenshotAn outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats. FontForge's file selection box is a bit unusual. You can switch between drives using the bookmarks menu. Be sure not to remove any drive bookmarks as you would be unable to switch between drives as you move PCs.

Learn more about FontForge...

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

FontForge Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Platform including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

FontForge Portable is available for immediate download from the FontForge Portable homepage. Get it today!

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Comments

John T. Haller's picture

Fixed the link and icon. Sorry about that.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Thanks a lot for finally making this excellent application available on Windows in a convenient manner, as so far the only way to run it was by resorting to Cygwin.

I install Russian version (but I have English locale - can't switch to Russian too) and see rectangles in words, not letters.
---Added after---
Reinstall it to English - the same problems with English version - boxes, not symbols.

John T. Haller's picture

The app itself is trying to display in Russian but your PC doesn't support showing in Russian for some reason. The language you select as it installs is only used by the installer, not the app. I think (but am not sure) the app detects the OS language and attempts to use that. But it likely cannot display Unicode characters. Is your Windows set to be in Russian? If so, I think that it is. In theory, FontForge is supposed to respect the LANG environment variable, so you should be able to edit your FontForgePortable.ini file within the FontForgePortable\App\AppInfo\Launcher directory and add the line:

LANG=en_GB

right after the HOME=%PAL:DataDir%\Home line in the Environment section. Note that it could be en or en_EN instead of en_US. But, it did not seem to work for me. It might for you.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

@VitaliyAT

Had the same problem, and ended up with several solutions. One of them is to change the standard ASCII chart to ASCII extended version with the support of Cyrillic symbols. (Surf the internet - i find it quite complex to do/explain)

The other way is much more simple - but you won't be able to see any russian text (seems to me that there was an error in %dir%\FontForgePortable\App\FontForge\bin\share\locale\ru\LC_MESSAGES\FontForge.mo that causes this "glitch")
So the easy way is to switch to en_GB (look above), and simply delete the russian LC_MESSAGES\FontForge.mo (it is highly recommended to backup the file)

I hope this feedback will help upgrade further multilingual versions,
thx for the app - it is truly amazing.

P.S. Удачи, Виталий Smile

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Arts live long - our life is too short to understand it.

I think I must be missing something here: I have downloaded the fontforge portable & started with a new font.

I'm still at the experimenting stage, but I can't get anywhere because after 2 or 3 simple action it crashes.

I'm not sure this is the portable apps version as I get the same problem with the .7z download from http://www.mpetroff.net/software/fontforge-windows/

I'd prefer to use it packaged as a portable app.

The crash happens on an old XP machine & a new Windows 7 laptop. I haven't a clue what's wrong.

At Matthew Petroff 's suggestion I dropped back to a Font Forge release dated 2011-02-22 - that seems to work, so perhaps the portable app version should do the same?