Crossfont: Easy-to-use font editor for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Crossfont: Easy-to-use font editor for Mac

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50 pointsthrecius14 comments

Note that there is a powerful and stable font editor called FontForge, widely used by professional type designers, which happens to be GPL-licensed:

https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

True; but it's perhaps worth noting that FontForge can have a fairly steep learning curve. There may be a place for a significantly easier tool for casual users, if it finds a different balance between power/flexibility and simplicity.

I don't know whether Crossfont gets that right - I haven't tried it - but I can imagine the market niche may well exist.

Seconding this. I'm a wannabe hobbyist type designer and I found FontForge to be prohibitively difficult to use. I'm sure it's wonderful once you sink in the many hours needed to learn it but I just want to drag around vectors and try things out. Like you, I don't know for sure if Crossfont hits this sweet spot but I would love it if someone managed to do so.

Other options you might want to consider -- but at a substantially higher price point -- would be Fontographer or Glyphs.app. In my experience they're substantially easier to get to grips with than FontForge. (I believe they both have free demos available, so you could play around a bit before deciding if you want to spend a couple hundred dollars on this hobby.)

I'm sceptical but more than happy to be wrong. Fonts are surprisingly complicated software and my suspicion is that the market of people who casually want to make them is small.

If someone interested in learning how to make fonts asked me for advice, I'd recommend he invest his time in FOSS software rather than proprietary tools which can (and do) fold and disappear. I've worked through FontForge's Beginners' guide and I'd recommend it to people with even a minor interest in type. You'll learn a lot beyond how to use the software itself:

http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

Personally, I would be interested in editing fonts, though I have little interest in making one from scratch; eg I like the idea of firacode ligatures, but I don’t care for the entire font (and not all of the ligature designs).

I imagine its too little to bother with picking up font forge, but an MS paint of fonts would be justifiable.

More specifically, I probably have a number of one-off usecases where a simple, shitty editor would be ideal; another example is that I like ascii diagram characters but I have yet to find a font that does all of them well. When using something like latex or monodraw, where I’ll eventually render an image of the text, a half-implented font of 12 characters that can only be built as postscript type 1 with an potentially infinitely recursive ligature definition would be exactly what I’m looking for, and a simple font designer probably gets me 90% of the way there

But I’m probably not a big market either

Fontforge is very useful and featureful but boy is it an eyesore.

I'm not sure if this refers to high DPI support or more general UI improvements. If it's the former, there are some workarounds in the GitHub issues: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/2155

Which is quite funny as you aren’t going to find many type designers without any aesthetic taste.

I noticed this in the FAQ:

"Why I get[sic] "Crossfont.app can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer." while open Crossfont?"

Maybe it's just me, but commercial macOS software really seems like it should be signed... especially if it isn't installed via the App Store.app (I can understand not wanting to give Apple the cut of the proceeds, but not expecting your customers to jump through those hoops...).

What distinguishes this from the many other font editors out there?

The main differences I can see are that this one does not have many features, and is much cheaper.

So... that seems like a useful distinction. I would consider dabbling in font design, but there’s no way I would but an expensive application for it, and I’d want it to be fairly simple.

Back when I was on Mac, I used Glyphs Mini[1] - it wasn't the cheapest, but it had a nice UI, did what I needed as a non-expert, and was much cheaper than the "full" version.

[1] https://glyphsapp.com/glyphs-mini

This website’s presentation leaves a bit to be desired. It’s very awkward on mobile.

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