FontForge Builds

Experimental Windows builds of FontForge

The aim of this project is to build development/bleeding-edge binaries/packages of FontForge for Windows. Stable builds may be found be found on the official FontForge website. The source code is found here.

These builds are compiled natively with MinGW-w64 (not CygWin), using the most up-to-date components and libraries where possible. Almost all required software and dependencies needed to compile FontForge were sourced from the MSYS2 project.

  • 07/11/20: Update for the 20201107 release.
  • 06/04/20: Rebuild to latest master to pick up a clipboard fix.
  • 14/03/20: Update for the 20200314 release.
  • 01/03/20: Updated to latest master, in prep for the next release.
  • 01/08/19: Update for the 20190801 release.
  • 02/06/19: Refreshed the build against latest master. The GDK3 backend is now always used, VcXsrv is no longer bundled. Python 3 is now used for the 32-bit builds. No further Python 2 builds will be provided.
  • 31/07/17: Synced with the 20170731 release. Compiled run_fontforge.exe with Visual Studio instead of GCC to avoid antivirus false positives.
  • 04/10/16: Synced with the 20161004/20161005 release
  • 13/08/16: Prelease build, synced with git master. Also built 64-bit version, upgrading to Python 3.5.
  • 05/04/16: Synced with the 20160404 release
  • 25/08/15: Synced with the 20150824 release
  • 14/06/15: Fixed bug in Window titles not being displayed properly.
  • 30/05/15: Experimental Unicode filename support (must be enabled in fontforge.bat). Fixing autorecover 'Forget' options and fixing hotkey saving. Ported MetaFont import function (must have e.g. MikTeX).

Known issues

  • Various GUI bugs

TODO list

  • Build system overhaul
  • Building against native (instead of mingw) Python
  • Fix some annoying GUI quirks.

Along with the standard installer version, a portable package is also provided.

Please note that the installer is incompatible with any previous versions of FontForge offered, including those by Matthew Petroff.

Latest version installer

FontForgeSetup-11-07-2020.exe (22.3 MB)

Latest version portable package

FontForge-mingw-w64-i686-f8bbd6-r1.7z (20.5MB)

64-bit builds

64-bit builds are now being offered. For now, only a portable version is provided - no installer. Generally speaking, 64-bit builds are built less often than the 32-bit counterpart.

If you find a bug specific to the 64-bit version, please notify me!

FontForge-mingw-w64-x86_64-f8bbd6-r1.7z (20.5MB)

  • Matthew Petroff also provides Windows builds of FontForge: Link
  • Relatively up-to-date CygWin builds can be found here: Link

The build scripts used have been uploaded to GitHub. Should you wish to build it yourself, see here for build instructions.

This project is maintained by Jeremy Tan. Feel free to post any issues specific to these builds to the tracker on GitHub.

Last modified 8/11/2020.