TTX and FontTools For Linux

Typeface production is now a lot easier with the TTX and FontTools application, which provides an open source, cross-platform and free alternative to proprietary and expensive programs that allow you to easily convert TrueType and OpenType fonts to and from the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format.

The FontTools part of the project is actually a library written in the Python programming language and designed to be used by the TTX program to manipulate fonts, supporting OpenType (OTF), TrueType (TTF), AFM (Adobe Font Metrics), Type 1, as well as various Mac OS X specific formats.

To install and use the TTX and FontTools program on your GNU/Linux computer, you will have to first download the latest version from Softpedia using the dedicated download button above, or via the project’s official website (see the homepage link at the end of the article).

Save the archive somewhere on your computer (preferably your Home folder), extract its contents using an archive manager utility, open a terminal emulator app and use the ‘cd’ command to move to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/fonttools-2.5).

Then, all you have to do is to run the ‘sudo python setup.py install’ command to install the program system wide and make it available to all uses on your system. Use it by running the ‘ttx’ command in the Terminal app.

Taking a look under the hood of the TTX and FontTools software, we can notice that it has beeen written entirely in the Python programming language. It’s a platform independent application that supports the GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. At the moment, it has been successfully installed on 32-bit and 64-bit computers.