FontForge install procedures
for cygwin under MS Windows

Installing from a pre-built package

Before you install

You must insure that you have cygwin installed on your system. Cygwin is free. (cygwin makes MS Windows look enough like unix to allow fontforge to run there).

First download the setup.exe program from http://www.cygwin.com/
Run it. It will ask you what components of cygwin you wish to install
You will need the base components, the X window system, xorg-x11-base, and xterm (NOTE: These are separate packages)
Once you have cygwin installed, start it. This should give you a terminal window running bash (a unix shell)

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I post a cygwin install package on sourceforge's file release system. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using the file release system, but you get the file eventually.

If you follow the link above you will end up on a page showing many releases of FontForge for many systems
in most cases you will want the most recent release.
Then click on the executable package you want to download:
- The cygwin release will be called something like "fontforge_cygwin-200xxxxx.tar.bz2
Then you have the joy of choosing a mirror site (pick one that's on the same continent you are) and click on the little icon in the download column
Then you wait. After a bit you get another copy of this same page. After an even longer time your browser notices that you've started a download.

Installing

I have no idea where your browser put the package you have just downloaded. This is unfortunate as I can't tell you exactly what to do next. But find the package (often it's on the desktop) and then move it into C:\cygwin\home\<username>. (where <username> is whatever name cygwin gave you)

Then open a cygwin window (by clicking on the cygwin icon)
With luck you will now be in the directory containing the package you downloaded.

Now type (do not type the "$"):

$ bunzip2 fontforge_cygwin-*.tar.bz2
$ tar xf fontforge_cygwin-*.tar
$ cd fontforge
$ ./doinstall

Then edit the file ~/.bashrc by (again do not type "$", use control-D (^D) to end):

$ cat >> ~/.bashrc
PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/bin ; export PATH
MANPATH=${MANPATH:-}:/usr/local/man ; export MANPATH
^D

Then each time you want to run fontforge, type:
```
$ xinit
```
This should bring up X in a large window that covers the screen and within that should be a subwindow, an xterm, running bash.
From the xterm you first start a window manager
```
$ twm &
```
And then you should be able start FontForge.
```
$ fontforge -new
```

Notes

Caveat: cygwin has a different approach to the file system than Windows. A filename like C:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf will be called /cygdrive/c/windows/fonts/arial.ttf under cygwin (backslashes are replaced by slashes, and the initial drive "C:" becomes "/cygdrive/c".

Similarly a cygwin filename "/home/<username>/myfont.ttf" becomes "C:\cygwin\home\<username>\myfont.ttf"

Caveat: Do NOT try to install a font by using fontforge to write the font directly to the Windows\Fonts directory. This doesn't work. Windows needs to do some magic when installing a font that it can't do if fontforge writes directly there. Instead have fontforge create the font somewhere else and then use Windows' own drag & drop technique to move the font from there into Windows\Fonts.