Autotracing bitmaps in FontForge

FontForge does not have a native autotrace, but it will happily use the output of two freely available programs which do autotracing. These are:

You must download at least one of these, (and possibly build it), and install it somewhere along your PATH.

Having done that you must get an image into the background of the character(s) you want to autotrace. There are several ways of doing this:

From a bitmap font
If you want to autotrace a bitmap font then (from the FontView)
From the clipboard
If you have an application that supports sending image selections by mime type (kde does this), then you should be able to copy the image in that application and paste it into the appropriate glyph window in FontForge
From an image file
If you have a bitmap in an image (it works best if it IS a black and white bitmap image, rather than a color image)
From multiple image files
If you have many images, you can load them with one command, but you must name them appropriately. For example if your font contains unicode characters U+0041 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A) through U+0049 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J) then create files called "uni0041.png", "uni0042.png", ... "uni0049.png" containing the images for the appropriate characters, then (from the Font View)

Once you have background images in your font (and have installed an autotrace program)

This can take a while, so be patient.

Warning: Unless you are working with a TeX bitmap font, you will most likely have an extremely low resolution image. Autotrace programs work better the more resolution you give them.

If you hold down the shift key when you invoke AutoTrace from the menu then you will be prompted for arguments to pass to it, if you do not hold down the shift key FontForge will use the same arguments it used last time. AutoTrace's arguments are described in "$ autotrace -help" or in the README file that came with the program. Please do not specify input/output files or formats. FontForge fills these in.

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