The new version of Fontforge is here. On the last couple of days I’ve been trying to compile and install it on my Mac OSX system, with very little success. Mainly because because MacPorts still doesn’t have it available and I lack the proper knowledge to do it in a clean way…

I though I had everything needed (from previous versions), but, as It turns out, the configure script kept freezing (searching for Freetype libraries) and, even after that, the make script crashed because of Python (?). I got something like this:

python.c:16039: warning: initialization makes integer from pointer without a cast
python.c:16042: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
python.c:16057: warning: initialization makes pointer from integer without a cast
python.c:16058: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
python.c:16067: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[1]: *** [python.lo] Error 1
make: *** [fontforge] Error 2

I took a little while, but, after reading the instructions and a little digging on Google, I found out this answer by Nicholas Spalinger regarding the Freetype Library timeout error during ./configure: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=605871

After a couple of trial-and-error runs (that included installing and uninstalling several versions of Python), I’ve decided to compile Fontforge without Python. In the end, the command I ended up using was:

./configure –with-freetype-src –without-python

I I know this is an easy way out, but I’ve reached the limits of my Unix capabilities… Fontforge is running smoothly for me (so far), and I hope this helps someone also…