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New
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Creates a new font with (by default) ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding. The default
encoding may be changed in the preference dlg.
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Open
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Brings up a file chooser and allows you to open a font in any of the formats
FontForge understands.
If you open a truetype font containing bitmaps then you will be asked if
you want to load some of the bitmaps as well as the outlines.
By default this dialog will display all files with extensions of pfa, pfb,
pt3, sfd, ttf, otf, otb, t42, cef, cff, gsf, ttc, svg, ik, mf and bdf (possibly
others as FontForge comes to support more formats). If you would also like
it to display .ps files then enter *.{pfa,pfb,ttf,otf,bdf,sfd,ps} and press
the Filter button. If you only want it to display sfd files enter *.sfd and
press Filter.
You may select multiple files (by holding down the shift or control keys
when clicking on them), and all selected files will be opened.
FontForge can open macbinary resource files containing postscript and truetype
fonts (it does not open bitmap fonts currently)
FontForge does not open Acorn RISC/OS files, but you can use
acorn2sfd to convert them into an sfd
file which FontForge can then open.
If you have mf and
autotrace
installed on your machine FontForge will process metafont's mf files
for you. But you might want to use pktrace, mftrace or some other
standalone program to do the job.
When importing a type3 font FontForge will ask
you a few questions. It shouldn't have to ask these questions, but this is
an imperfect world and FontForge an imperfect program. In some rare cases
FontForge will crash if it tries to do a remove overlap. The remove overlap
functionality is important for interpreting stroked paths so you really should
have it on. But if a crash happens then, turn it off (and the crash should
not repeat, but some functionality will be lost).
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Recent
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A submenu showing recently used sfd files.
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Close
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Closes the current window.
If this is a font view and the font has been changed, then it will ask whether
you want to save the font. It will also close any outline glyph, bitmap glyph
or metrics views associated with the font.
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Save
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Saves the current file. If it is associated with a spline font database it
will be saved there and a backup file will be created. If it is a new font,
or if the font has been read from a postscript font file, then a Save As
dialog will pop up.
If you are editing a font "Ambrosia.sfd" then the backup file will be called
"Ambrosia~.sfd".
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Save As...
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Allows you to give a new name to the current spline font database. Pops up
a file picker.
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Save All
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Saves all changed fonts. If any have not been named, it will pop up a Save
As file picker for that font.
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Generate Fonts...
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This generates font files, both outline and bitmap.
You may choose not to generate either, you may generate an afm file or a
pfm file, you may select the type of postscript output, you may select which
pixelsizes of bitmap to generate. (See that page
for more info)
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Generate Mac Family...
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This is only available if there are multiple fonts open in the same family,
and if the current font is the "Plain" style of that family. It generates
a mac FOND structure containing references to all family members, NFNT, sfnt,
and POST resources for all selected faces. It brings up a
dlg very similar to the Generate fonts dialog,
but one that includes a list of all potential faces for family members.
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Revert
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Rereads the font from the file on the disk. All changes are lost.
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Revert Glyph
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Only available in the font and outline views. Rereads the font from the sfd
file on the disk searching for a glyph in that file with the same name as
the current glyph. All changes to this glyph will be lost (but if the glyph
has references then any changes made to the glyphs being refered to will
still be visible), this command may be undone.
So if you have changed the name of the glyph this command will fail.
If the font did not come from an sfd file this command will fail.
If the font has been reencoded and the glyph has references this command
may fail.
If you have made a global change to the font (like scaling it to a new em-size)
then the results may not be appropriate.
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Export...
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In the Outline view this allows you to export the splines that make up the
glyph into an encapsulated postscript (.eps), pdf, svg or xfig format (.fig
-- the conversion to fig format is not the best) file. You may also have
the glyph rasterized and output in either .xbm or .bmp (or png if you have
that library) formats (FontForge will prompt you for a pixelsize. bmp also
allows you to generate an anti-aliased image, and you will be prompted for
bits per pixel. 1 bit per pixel is a bitmap).
In the Bitmap view this allows you to export the current glyph as either
a .xbm or a .bmp (always as a bitmap) file.
This menu item is not available in the Font or Metrics Views.
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Import...
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In the Font View this allows you to import one or several bitmap fonts (from
a .bdf file or a ttf/otf/ttc file, TeX pk (gf) file, an X11 .pcf file or
a mac dfont) and merge it into the list of bitmap sizes stored in the database.
You may also load one bitmap font into the backgrounds of the outline glyphs
(So "A" from the bitmap font goes into the background of the "A" outline
glyph), this is to make tracing glyphs easier. Be careful, you need to load
a big bitmap for autotrace to be useful.
NOTE: FontForge
is unable to read an encoding from pk files, you will may need to set it
with "Force Encoding" after you've loaded the pk file.
You may also load images into the glyph backgrounds. There are two ways to
do this, you may either select several image files and they will be loaded
consecutively into selected glyphs, or you may select an image template and
all images whose filename match that template will be loaded into the backgrounds
of the appropriate glyphs. Image templates look like "uni*.png" or "enc*.gif"
or "cid*.tiff". You select the template by selecting a filename which matches
that template-- So if you select "uni1100.gif" then all image files which
start with "uni" and end with ".gif" and contain a valid unicode number will
be loaded and placed in the appropriate place. Files named "enc*" or "cid*"
are handled similarly except that they specify the current encoding (and
the number must be in decimal rather than hex).
If you are editing a multi-layered font (and
have a version of FontForge configured for it) then you can also import an
image into one of the foreground layers.
FontForge does best when given bitmap images.
It will grey out the foreground and make the background transparent. It will
also compress them when it stores them in the sfd file. It will handle most
other image formats but does not try to optimize them in anyway. Please use
bitmaps here.
You may load an encapsulated postscript file (or rather the sub-set of postscript
that FontForge understands) into the foreground of glyphs. As with images
above this may import either depending on the selection or a template.
If you have libxml2 on your system then FontForge will also be able to import
svg files. As with postscript, only a subset of svg is understood).
In the Outline View this allows you to import an image into the background
(see the above remark about bitmaps, or import
eps or fig files into the foreground (the xfig conversion is really bad,
the eps conversion is very limited).
In the Bitmap View this allows you to import a bitmap image into the glyph.
This menu item is not available in the Metrics View
In the font view you may select multiple files (by holding down the shift
or control keys when clicking on them), and all selected bitmap fonts will
be imported into the sfd.
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Merge Kern Info...
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Only available in the font view window. This command will allow you to search
for an afm, tfm or mac resource file containing kerning pairs for the specified
font. In many cases it will not be needed because when FontForge opens a
.pfa or .pfb font it will automagically search for an appropriate .afm file
in the same place. But sometimes afm files are stored in other directories.
And sometimes you want to import information from TeX, from mac resource
files or from windows pfm filew.
NOTE: FontForge
is unable to read an encoding from tfm files or from mac resource files,
it is your responsibility to ensure that the encoding of your font matches
that of the tfm file BEFORE merging kerning information. This is
unfortunate, sorry.
Note: When loading a postscript font from a mac resource file, the associated
kerning data will be found in the FOND stored with a bitmap font for this
face. FontForge can't guess the name of this file when loading the font.
You must figure it out yourself.
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Print...
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Not available in the bitmap view. Allows you to print out all the glyphs
in the font, a text sample of the font, or specific glyphs at a very large
scale.
See the section on printing for more information.
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Display...
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Not available in the bitmap view. Similar to print, except it displays what
you will see on the screen. You must have freetype on your system for it
to be of any use. See the section on display for
more information.
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Execute Script...
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Only in the font view. Brings up a dlg and allows you to enter a
script, which could be just calling a prewritten
script file. There is a [Call] button in the dlg to help you locate any such
files. The default extension is "*.pe" (postscript edit) but you can change
that with the [Filter] button if you use something else.
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Script Menu
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Only in the font view. You may define up to 10
scripts that you want to execute frequently
and place them in this menu. The scripts may also be invoked by short cut
with the first one being invoked by Control-Meta(Alt)-1, the second
Control-Meta-2, and the tenth by Control-Meta-0. The scripts are set in the
preferences dialog
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Preferences...
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This pops up a dialog allowing you to configure various
esoteric bits of fontforge.
A number of things that might be controlled from a preference window are
controlled by X Resources.
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Quit
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Exits the program, prompting you whether to save any changed fonts.