Utilities for examining fonts — FontForge 20251009 documentation

# Utilities for examining fonts

A number of utilities are bundled in the source distribution of FontForge. These may be found here: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/tree/master/contrib/fonttools

- acorn2sfd
  - Bugs
  - See Also
- fontimage
  - See Also
- fontlint
  - See Also
- sfddiff
  - See Also

## ShowTTF

showttf is a program which will decompose a truetype (or opentype) font file into its various tables and display the contents of those tables as best it can. It will also point out the errors it finds in the file. This is similar to MicroSoft’s ttfdump (except mine shows some of Apple’s tables which ttfdump does not), and to Apple’s ftxdumperfuser (except mine shows some OpenType tables which Apple’s ignores). And, of course, mine is open source and runs on most any system.

    showttf fontfile

## Ttf2Eps

ttf2eps will allow you to extract one (or all) glyphs from a font and convert them into eps files.

## PfaDecrypt

pfadecrypt will undo Adobe’s encryption on pfa/pfb files and converts the byte codes into readable postscript like instructions.

## Pcl2Ttf

Will extract ttf or bitmap fonts embedded in an hp pcl file. Bitmap fonts become bdf fonts (I don’t have any examples of run length encoded bitmap fonts, and do not currently support them. If you have an rle bitmap pcl font please send it to me). I have neither documentation on nor examples of the “Intellifont” format, so these fonts are not supported.