GLIF Converter

Extract text from Glyph files (GLIF)


Drop or upload your .GLIF file
✈

How to extract text from your GLIF file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your GLIF file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert GLIF to another file type

To convert GLIF files to another format, you need RoboFont or other Font software.

Convert a file to GLIF

To convert other file formats to the "Glyph Interchange Format File" file type, you need software like RoboFont or a similar tool.


About GLIF files

A .glif file is an XML-based Glyph Interchange Format document. It stores the vector paths, anchors, and advance width data for exactly one character within a Unified Font Object (UFO) font project. Typography professionals use tools like RoboFont, Glyphs, and FontForge to build typefaces character by character using this format. You can learn more on the Unified Font Object Wikipedia page. This format has severe limitations outside of specialized type design workflows. A .glif file is virtually useless on its own because it lacks critical global font data like kerning, spacing, and baseline metrics which are stored elsewhere in the parent directory. You cannot open it in standard web browsers or general vector tools like Adobe Illustrator. Users often struggle because it is fundamentally an XML text file containing coordinate math, not a standard visual image. Standard online converters fail because they expect a complete compiled font file, not an isolated single-character XML snippet. To use the shape in a design, you should convert .glif to SVG, which preserves the vector paths for standard graphic tools. To build a working font, you must process the entire parent UFO folder into a TTF or OTF file instead. Because this format is highly specialized, extracting the visual data is difficult.

Convert.Guru analyzes your GLIF file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.


FAQ

If you want to convert GLIF file to TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2, EOT, SVG, BDF, PCF, FNT, FON, PFM or AFM, you can use RoboFont or similar software from the "Font Glyph Outline Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert UFO, WOFF, PFB, GXF, AFM, F3F, SFD, WOFF2, PSF, TTF, TXF or OTF files to GLIF, try RoboFont or another comparable tool in the "Font Glyph Outline Storage" category.



The GLIF Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our GLIF converter.