Where to Find Birdfont Tutorials and Documentation

Updated

Birdfont's own site is the starting point: the homepage links to a Tutorials section and a separate Instructions page, and the site also publishes release notes that double as a changelog of features you may need to learn. There is no single manual covering everything, so expect to combine the official tutorials, the instructions page, and the release notes. Everything below is drawn from what birdfont.org itself lists.

Official learning resources on birdfont.org

The site's navigation includes these relevant entries:

Resource What it covers
Tutorials Step-by-step material for creating fonts
Instructions Guidance on ways to create fonts with Birdfont, including an advanced example using variable glyph properties
Release Notes Version-by-version list of new features and fixes (currently up to 6.15)
Fonts Fonts made with Birdfont, plus a way to submit your own work
Support / Bugs & Help Where to ask questions when the docs run out

The Instructions page is the closest thing to documentation for advanced work. The site describes one example there as "an advanced example using variable glyph properties" — useful if you are past basic glyph drawing and want to work with variable font behavior.

Using the release notes as documentation

Because Birdfont ships frequently, the release notes are effectively a feature guide. Recent entries that tell you what the editor can do:

  • 6.15 — control point position shown in the toolbox when the point tool is selected; dark canvas theme
  • 6.14 — faster spacing classes; abort a move in the point or move tool with ESC; anchor glyphs can point to other anchor glyphs
  • 6.13 — new color selector (a color wheel)
  • 6.12 — updates to ligature generation
  • 6.11 — improved emoji support, new ligature tab, speed optimizations
  • 6.10 — better drawing tools, complete stroke in close path, search and view Unicode blocks in the overview tab, apply grid to anchor marks, SVG parser updates
  • 6.9 — visual indication for glyphs already added to the font, glyph info in tooltips, button to hide batch transformations (resize, auto-bold, etc.)
  • 6.8 — bug fixes and new key bindings

If a tutorial you find online describes a menu that no longer matches your version, check the release notes for the version where that area changed.

Getting help when the tutorials don't answer your question

The site lists these contact points under Contact, Bugs & Help:

GitHub issues is the most durable place for a bug report, since it keeps a searchable record; the social accounts are better for quick questions.

Before you start a tutorial

You need Birdfont installed first. The site states that installers and source code packages are available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and BSD, downloadable from birdfont.org. Birdfont is described as a free font editor that lets you create vector graphics and export TTF, OTF and SVG fonts, with good support for both monochrome and color font formats — so a tutorial on color or emoji glyphs is within scope, not a workaround.

Practical path through the material

  1. Install Birdfont from the Download page for your platform.
  2. Read the Instructions page for the general workflow of creating a font.
  3. Work through the Tutorials section for hands-on steps.
  4. When you hit a feature that behaves differently from a tutorial, search the Release Notes for the relevant version.
  5. If it is still unclear, file an issue on GitHub or ask on Mastodon.

The site also mentions that support donations and an optional subscription fund bug fixes and new features, but this does not gate access to the tutorials, instructions, or downloads described above.