Which is the best free font editor?

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lcmchris
lcmchris Posts: 2
in Font Technology
Of all the free font editors out there (FontForge, Birdfont, Glyphr Studio, Fontra etc), which one is the best?
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Comments

  • Abdurrahman Hanif
    Abdurrahman Hanif Posts: 11
    FontForge is great overall. If they could simplify the UI a bit, it would be the perfect free font editor.
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 76
    It depends on what you need. Fontforge is classic, but a bit dated and has lots of unsolved bugs due to its old code and few overburdened maintainers and does not support newer technologies like color fonts and variable fonts. Fontra is new, specially useful for creating variable font, but somewhat lacking in support for Opentype tables. Best is to use a combination. For example I create variable font in Fontra, add Opentype table in Fontforge, add color tables using adobe ot-svg, nanoemoji, Fonttools ttx, fontpainter etc, all of which are free, libre and useful in their own way. 
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,028
    Depends a lot on your definition of “best,” and who the user is and what they need to do.

    Font Forge: Reasonably usable and sorta complete-ish NOW. Even if it does have an interface only Linux users will be ok with. Not currently under active development, and seems unlikely to see major future updates (very old codebase super hard to update). Not super well suited to variable fonts or color fonts.

    Fontra. Reasonably likely to be developed into the future. Good choice for teams and folks doing variable fonts. But still needs some features.

    Glyphr seems to be aimed specifically at beginners and non-professional users. This is fine, but obviously should not be expected to compete on features.

    Birdfont I have not looked at enough to have a fully-informed opinion on.

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