FontForge install procedures
for cygwin under MS Windows

Installing from a pre-built cygwin package

Before you install

You must insure that you have cygwin installed on your system. Cygwin is free. (cygwin makes MS Windows look enough like unix to allow fontforge to run there). Getting all the bits of cygwin seems to be the hardest part of installing fontforge -- probably because it is the least expected part.

Alternatives to cygwin.

There are now alternatives to cygwin.

Someone has ported fontforge to mingw, which is much simpler to download than cygwin:

Instead of downloading cygwin you can install one of the virtual machines (or something similar) which run linux, and then install fontforge from a linux package.

Obtaining one of my pre-built packages

I post a cygwin install package on sourceforge's file release system. There's a certain amount of pother involved in using the file release system, but you get the file eventually.

Installing

I have no idea where your browser put the package you have just downloaded. This is unfortunate as I can't tell you exactly what to do next. But find the package (often it's on the desktop) and then move it into C:\cygwin\home\<username>. (where <username> is whatever name cygwin gave you)