Filter Glyphs by Encoding or Script in FontForge

Managing large fonts in FontForge can be overwhelming when viewing thousands of characters at once, but you can streamline your workspace by filtering displayed glyphs using encoding sets and script-specific views. This guide explains how to switch the font view's encoding to isolate specific scripts, hide empty character slots, and quickly jump to target Unicode ranges.

Switch the Active Encoding

The main font view displays glyphs arranged according to an encoding standard. To display a specific script or character subset:

1. Open your font file in FontForge.
2. Click Encoding in the top menu bar.
3. Select Reencode.
4. Choose an encoding system from the list that matches your target script. FontForge includes presets such as ISO 8859 sets (covering various European, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Greek scripts), Unicode (BMP), or specific Asian encodings like Big5 and SJIS.

Once selected, the glyph matrix rearranges to match the chosen standard, placing the corresponding characters at the beginning of the view.

Hide Empty and Unused Glyphs

By default, FontForge shows empty slots for unassigned code points within an encoding. You can collapse these to see only the glyphs present in your font:

1. Go to the Encoding menu.
2. Click Compact.

When enabled, FontForge removes all empty slots from the display, showing only characters that have actual outlines or definitions mapped to the active encoding. Selecting Compact again will restore the full grid.

Navigate Directly by Unicode Script Blocks

If working in a full Unicode mapping, you can filter your view to specific script blocks without altering the encoding:

1. Click View in the top menu.
2. Select Goto (or press Ctrl + Shift + >).
3. In the pop-up dialog, choose the Unicode tab.
4. Select your desired script or block from the dropdown menu (such as Basic Latin, Devanagari, or Cyrillic), then click OK.

The font view will immediately scroll and highlight the start of that script's code block.