FontForge Portable

Some people are more passionate about fonts than others, but if you work in graphic design or an adjacent field, the way your text looks obviously is of importance. Either way, it's best you come prepared, and for that, you’ll need a few tools you can trust.

If the selection of available fonts is not up to your liking, adopting the “fine, I’ll do it myself” method may seem foolish to some, but it is nevertheless an option. FontForge Portable can help users edit and create fonts, provided they have the time and patience to go through with the process.

Perhaps an accurate description for FontForge Portable would be that it’s really a quite complex tool, and that it does live up to its name. Even if you are not too familiar with the operations that involve creating and editing fonts, the developer provides a comprehensive Help manual for you to peruse.

As for operating the app, it’s simple at first. The complexity stems from the tools you’re afforded when it comes to the actual font creation and editing. There’s essentially a variety of ways through which you can manipulate lettering to your liking: the Tools panel features a generous selection of instruments, from pen tools and rulers to anchors, curves, and much more.

The program also gives you the ability to transform the look of your fonts and glyphs, with some being accessible via the Element dropdown. Users can modify the styling of their font by changing its weight, condensing or extending its lettering, managing overlaps, expanding strokes, and so on.

And to top it all off, a Layers functionality is likewise present, affording users to experiment with more intricate designs.

There’s clearly a lot to FontForge Portable, and though the tool somehow remains portable despite its complexity, I would have to say that it’s certainly not something intended for a general audience: the learning curve to attaining the know-how to fully operate the app is quite steep, but if you’re looking for a tool you won’t outgrow anytime soon for font creation and editing, this one is a pretty strong contender.