Making your own font
Submitted by ejbarnes on Wed, 03/25/2009 - 00:57.
I encounter rumors now and then that it's possible to create your own font. Well, of course it is, but are a scanner and Photoshop enough?
A company called FontLab was apparently bought out by Adobe a while ago, and they have one (expensive) font design program called Studio and a (cheaper) font design program called TypeTool. You can download play copies of these tools from the Adobe website; at least that's where I think I got my play copies about a month ago.
Haven't really had time to noodle around with them much; and what I really want is to be able to scan in handwritten characters (I've developed a hand lettering style I actually rather like) and tweak them into bold, italic, etc. (Yes, I know I'll have to do punctuation, numerals, and the standard Western European diacriticals to make the set "complete"...or as complete as it gets.)
But I don't want to drop $100 (for TypeTool) or multiples of that (Studio) if a scanner and Photoshop are enough.
Anybody tried this sort of thing?
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I've used Fontlab Studio before and I love the interface and the options it allows, but there are a couple free alternatives around on the net that you can play around with and get the hang of font creation, like FontForge, and FontStruct
A couple good tutorials to start with are this one from Chank Co, and this one on the Wired Wiki .
Since you already have a scanner and Photoshop, with a vector program like Inkscape, you should be good to go.
-phil
Thanks for tips!
Dear Phil,
Thanks for the tips. My vector-based software is Adobe Illustrator, so I should be good to go (I just upgraded to CS4 across the board).
The WiredWiki page says that FontForge may be complicated to install on Windows (I'm running XP). I'll look further into both FontForge and FontStruct and see what I turn up.
Thanks again!
ejb