This is part of the old website. New website begins at fontforge.github.io

Are you a web developer? Help us migrate this page on Github

FontForge install procedures
for unix/linux based systems

I no longer provide pre-built packages. You may either compile from source or download a package from another site (most linux distributors will have a fontforge package).

Installing from a pre-built package

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I used to post pre-built packages for i386 linux systems and for Sparc Solaris systems. These can still be found on sourceforge's file release system. But they are out of date now. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using this system, but you get the file eventually.

Obtaining a package from another source

Most of the linux distributions have packages for fontforge. These will often be a little older than my packages, but perhaps more stable. I shall not try to provide a complete list, but I am aware of the following sites:

Installing from an rpm

The i386 package I provide, and many of the linux packages others provide are "rpm" files.

Installing an rpm package is relatively straight forward. You will need to be root. Move to the directory containing the downloaded rpm, and then type (do not type the "$" or "#"): 

# rpm -i fontforge-*.rpm

If you've already installed fontforge and are updating an earlier version then you should type: 

# rpm -U fontforge-*.rpm

Installing from an executable tarball

The solaris package I provide is a bzipped tarball (that is, it has an extension of ".tar.bz2"). You will probably need to be root for some of this process. Move to the directory containing the downloaded tarball and type (do not type the "$" or "#"): 

$ bunzip2 fontforge-*.tar.bz2
$ tar xf fontforge-*.tar
$ cd fontforge
$ su
# ./doinstall

(Older versions may have an extension of .tgz. In this case you would replace the first two lines with "$ tar xfz fontforge-*.tgz")

Caveat: My packages generally install to /usr/local, and this may not be in your default PATH. You may need to add a line like 

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin ; export PATH

to your ~/.bashrc file (or equivalent if you use a different shell).

What's in a package

Just in case you are interested. My packages contain:

Ports that I am aware of

FontForge has been ported to the following systems (at some point in its life)