![]() ![]() Here’s where you’ll fire up Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator, or any other vector illustration program). Then do the same as above – adjust the brightness/contrast/levels. I’d say take several pictures of different chunks of the alphabet. You can also do this step with a camera – just be sure to take your pictures in good lighting, and from directly above the letters so that they aren’t at an angle. (And use the paintbrush to cover up any stray cat hairs that just might have made their way between the paper and the scanner glass.) Adjust the brightness and contrast and levels so that the paper is nice and white, and the letters are as dark as possible. Here’s where you’ll fire up GIMP (or Photoshop, if you have it) – scan in the page with your alphabet on it and clean it up a bit. (If you’re more comfortable drawing your font in GIMP or Inkscape or Photshop or Illustrator or whatever computer-based drawing program you like, go for it! That just means you can skip this next scanning step.) But since this is a general overview, that’s detail we can get into in another post. Of course, non-English languages use letters with accent marks and additional punctuation. ![]() If you’re typing in English, you probably don’t use much more punctuation than what’s printed on the keys.) (Not sure what punctuation to do? Look at your keyboard. #FONTFORGE BASELINE FULL#(The cat helped.) I did a full set of uppercase and lowercase letters, the numbers 0-9, and some punctuation. I think I ended up using 6 different pens, from a fancy brush pen to a Sharpie to a plain old Crayola marker on these tests.įor this demonstration font, I decided to do a quick alphabet with the Crayola marker. I like to start with the lowercase A, and monkey around with it to see what floats my boat. It’s always handy to try out some different things on paper. (Note: what is it about cats that they have to be part of what you’re doing? See tail at the top of that image.) (In most font creation programs, you can adjust the location of both of those lines.) Just remember to keep all of your letters between the ascent and descent lines, or else they may get cut off. Most ascenders go to the cap height, but you have that additional ascent line at the very top in case you want to do something really tall and flourishy. Likewise, lowercase B and D have a stem called an ascender. Some letters, like the lowercase G or P, have a tail called a descender – these can go down to (but not beyond) the descent line. The cap height is the height of your capital letters. The x-height is the height of the lowercase X, as well as many other lowercase letters. The baseline is the line on which all of your letters should rest. When drawing up the letters for your font, there are five guidelines to keep in mind. And if you own Illustrator, then you don’t need Inkscape. Of course, if you already have a copy of Photoshop, you can use that instead of GIMP. As such, they may have a steeper learning curve than paid programs. #FONTFORGE BASELINE FREE#GIMP, Inkscape, and FontForge are all free open-source programs. * GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) – image editing program * A scanner / digital camera / cell phone camera (if you’re still rocking it old-school) * Paper and pen/pencil (if you want to rock it old-school) This post is meant to be a general high-level overview of the steps involved I could go into another dozen posts’ worth of detail about every one of these steps. #FONTFORGE BASELINE SOFTWARE#And some of those software options are FREE! Today I’m going to create a font from scratch, using free open-source software. I’m happy to tell you, however, there is a happy medium! You can create sharp, clean, well-spaced fonts on any computer, using a wide variety of software. ![]() (And forget about kerning!) Or you could spend hundreds of dollars on a top-of-the-line software suite and spend months perfecting your font. There are tons of ways out there to create a font – you could plug a scan of your handwriting into one of several creation websites and get an immediate font, but it won’t necessarily be as clean or sharp as you’d like it to be. ![]()
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