Birdfont, a free and open source font editor, has reached the 2.0 release recently with new UI layout, bug fixes and a few improvements.

BirdFont is a free font editor that lets you create vector graphics and export TTF, EOT & SVG fonts. It is written by Johan Mattsson using Vala programming language, works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The 2.0 release brings:

• New UI layout
• New zoom tool
• Improved background import
• Customizable short cuts
• New tab for changing font name
• Illustrator SVG import and other bug fixes
• Load bf fonts faster

How to Install/Upgrade birdfont in Ubuntu:

The binary packages have been made into my personal PPA (unofficial), available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04.

Open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. When it opens, run command below to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/birdfont

After that, update system package cache and install the editor by running below two commands one by one:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install birdfont

If you don’t want to add PPA, download & install the .deb package directly from launchpad page.

New to Birdfont? See the video tutorials on its website.

BirdFont is a free font editor that lets you create vector graphics and export TTF, EOT & SVG fonts. It’s an open-source editor written in Vala.

BirdFont is developed by Johan Mattsson with a good number of people contributing translations and patches. The editor now is at version 1.3 and has around 42 000 lines of code.

BirdFont has been made into default Ubuntu repositories since 14.10 Utopic. But the packages are old at the moment.

I’ve upload the latest build into PPA with the debian files belong to Ubuntu official. The PPA so far supports Ubuntu 14.10 and derivatives, such as Linux Mint 17.

To install the latest BirdFont (1.3 so far) in Ubuntu:

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the commands below and run one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/birdfont

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install birdfont

After that, you can receive future updates through Software Updater.

For those who don’t want to add the PPA repository, grab the .deb package directly from THIS PAGE.

To get started using the editor, please read the official tutorials.