The Trick to Using Fontforge
Published at 13:32 on 18 March 2018
The trick to using Fontforge is to realize: (a) that its Apple Mac support is broken, and (b) Apple Mac support really isn’t critical; in fact, it’s missing from most non-Apple-supplied fonts anyhow, yet Macs manage to work just fine with them. A further wrinkle is that Fontforge tends to want to gratuitously foist its broken Apple font features onto you, and having done so, to then conceal this fact from you when you examine the broken font files it has generated.
Naturally, you must leave “Apple” unchecked in the File > Generate Fonts > Options window. But that’s not enough! Unless you go into File > Preferences > Mac, delete everything from the Features tab, then verify the Mapping tab is also equally empty, you’ll still get a broken font that will fail to work properly on a Mac.
Having done all that, though, I’m finally able to edit out the stupid kerning pairs that have been vexing me and no longer have to cope with them after-the-fact. Hurray!
So I’m now not only taking offense at the way stock fonts I find work but also editing them to suit my preferences. I guess this officially makes me a font geek.