FontForge
FreeBuild your own typeface, or fix somebody else's
An open-source font editor. Draw and edit glyph outlines, adjust spacing and kerning, define ligatures and OpenType features, and generate TTF, OTF and WOFF files. It is equally used to modify existing fonts — adding missing glyphs, altering weights, merging fonts and converting formats.
Why we picked it
Fonts are an overlooked category of software. Designing, building a website or making a game, you may need a character an existing font lacks, need to merge two fonts, need to convert TTF to WOFF2 for the web, or simply want to make your own typeface. Commercial font editors — Glyphs, FontLab — run from hundreds to over a thousand dollars.
FontForge is the only mature open-source option here. 7,893 stars, GPL-3.0, maintained for over two decades, and the tool behind a great many open-source typefaces.
What it does:
- Glyph drawing with Bézier outline editing and typography-specific guides — baseline, x-height, cap height, ascenders and descenders — in both outline and bitmap modes.
- Spacing and kerning. Half of how a font looks is the glyphs and half is the spacing. It adjusts side bearings per glyph and sets kerning for specific pairs, such as tightening "AV".
- OpenType features: ligatures, small caps, figure styles (tabular, proportional, oldstyle), superscripts and subscripts, and glyph substitution rules.
- Generation and conversion: export TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2 and SVG fonts, convert between them, and produce subsets for the web.
- Modifying existing fonts — the reason many people actually use it: adding missing characters, reshaping a glyph, merging a Latin font with a CJK one, or stripping unneeded characters to reduce file size.
The barriers are real:
- The interface is thoroughly dated. Its UI belongs to twenty years ago — many windows, deep menus, dense buttons — and the first launch is genuinely confusing. This is the most common complaint and it is justified.
- Type design is itself a specialist discipline. The software is only a tool; drawing glyphs that are structurally correct, proportionally coherent and legible at every size requires typographic knowledge rather than software skill. A complete, usable typeface is a project measured in months.
- CJK fonts are enormous undertakings. Common-use Chinese alone runs past six thousand glyphs, and full standard coverage reaches tens of thousands. Building one from scratch alone is impractical; the usual approach is modifying an existing open font.
- Releases are infrequent, with the current version from October 2025 and the repository still maintained.
Who it suits: designers and developers modifying existing fonts, people building icon fonts, students studying type design, and anyone patient enough to draw their own. If you simply need a free commercially usable typeface, look to Google Fonts and the major open-source families rather than building one.