How do you make a font?

ast3r3xast3r3x
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Well i think the thread explains my question well enough...there is a girl i'm friends with (haha man she is really cute too!) but he handwriting is the neatest i've ever seen...its so perfect its freaky even for a girl. So how could i go about making it into a font (cuz i dont know how i would make it scalable)





just wondering if there is a somewhat easy way to do this

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    burningwheelburningwheel Posts: 1,827member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ast3r3x

    Well i think the thread explains my question well enough...there is a girl i'm friends with (haha man she is really cute too!) but he handwriting is the neatest i've ever seen...its so perfect its freaky even for a girl. So how could i go about making it into a font (cuz i dont know how i would make it scalable)





    just wondering if there is a somewhat easy way to do this



    i believe people useMacromedia Fontographer
  • Reply 2 of 5
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by burningwheel

    i believe people useMacromedia Fontographer



    thanks ill check that out
  • Reply 3 of 5
    the cool gutthe cool gut Posts: 1,714member
    If your looking for something that will run in OSX ... here's a review of Fontlab:



    http://www.macaddict.com/issues/0305/rev.fontlab.html



    These are both expensive apps though ...



    *Edit: fontographer will actually run in OSX, but only in classic mode.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    macusersmacusers Posts: 840member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by the cool gut

    If your looking for something that will run in OSX ... here's a review of Fontlab:



    http://www.macaddict.com/issues/0305/rev.fontlab.html



    These are both expensive apps though ...



    *Edit: fontographer will actually run in OSX, but only in classic mode.



    They also reviewed FontLab in Macworld Magazine,it got a great rating, and i hear it is really good
  • Reply 5 of 5
    overhopeoverhope Posts: 1,123member
    I've played about with Fontlab before, and in a market has precisely two players (one of which hasn't been updated in years), it's got to be the only choice. Nice and stable, well-integrated into OS X, and it works. Not much else I need to say.



    There's no end of jargon to learn if you want to do it properly, but if you're looking to bang something out fastish, you can get a decent-looking font together in a few hours (ignoring the few days you'll need to design it in the first place).



    There's an add-on to Fontlab called Scanfont which is sort of like OCR in reverse for TIFF files, so you'd get your friend to write out an alphabet, scan it, throw it into Scanfont, then tell it which character is which: it does all the rest for you. Then you export the resulting file into Fontlab, tweak it as you see fit (usually the baselines and kerning will be a bit weird to start with) and export the finished result as whatever font format you like: I tend to go for Truetype, because then it scales without you having to tweak the individual point sizes.



    Actually getting the font into your system isn't hard, but getting it to look really, really good is where all the hard work goes. I tend to use mine for logotypes on websites, where it's not really all that crucial.
Sign In or Register to comment.