It's been years since I was able to easily use Fontographer, the Windows font-editor software I paid a pretty penny for. It thinks that 2GB of RAM (or more) is actually a negative amount, so when I try to run it, it exits with the complaint that there's not enough memory. So I've got to reduce the amount of physical memory and lower the swapfile size so the total system memory is under 2GB just to run the damn thing.

Recently, Lisa mentioned that my historical fonts don't work on her Mac. I was wondering whether or not I could justify spending the $300 to upgrade to Fontlab (which would also let me incorporate nifty OpenType features), when just for the heck of it I typed apt-cache search "font editor" on my Linux box¹. It indicated that, among other things, I could install FontForge, a "Font Editor for PS, TrueType and OpenType fonts".

Completely free.

It was written by a guy who was frustrated by the limitations of Fontographer, so he wrote his own. It's very similar to Fontographer, and seems to have all its capabilities plus all the OpenType niftiness I was drooling over in Fontlab. Oh, and it's free.

So now I'm down to only three things keeping Windows on my main machine: Animation:Master, SONAR and games.

1. apt is the Advanced Package Tool for Debian Linux, another reason that I ♥ Linux. If I want to check for updates to all my installed software² and upgrade anything that has a new version available, all I need to do is type sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade. Try that in Windows!

2. Well, everything installed via apt, which is just about everything on my machine.