Sometimes when a class or a lab meeting isn't very captivating, I'll divert some of my attention to doodling.[1] Sometimes my doodles are abstract, sometimes they're of creatures (real or imagined), sometimes they're of faces or facial features, and sometimes I try to draw fancy scripts. It's this last I want to talk about. A few times, after writing a word with fancy or unusual letters, I'll think, "Man, this is pretty good!" It's certainly better than Comic Sans or Cooper Black or (dare I say it?) Helvetica.[2] Not only did I want to save these, but I actually wanted to try creating a computer font out of them. My earliest attempts were simply drawing the letters, pixel by pixel, using Microsoft Paint. This was tedious, inexact, and produced bitmap fonts instead of vector fonts.[3] So eventually I began searching for superior alternatives.
The first one that I found was called FontCreator [4], by a company called High-Logic. This was my first experience with vector graphics, though I didn't know it at the time. This was also my first experience with kerning.[5] It took me a while to learn my way around the software, but eventually I got up and running and designed a few fonts and exported them as .ttf files before my trial subscription ran out. One nice thing about FontCreator is that it can generate kerning pairs for you instead of making you do them all manually. However, unless you work really fast and have a limited number of font ideas (or want to fork out some money), this might not meet all of your needs.[6]
Later on I was introduced to a website called FontStruct (which can be seen here). FontStruct is free to use, you just have to log in to use it and save your font creations. Unlike FontCreator, where you draw the curves that make each letter, FontStruct provides you with basic shapes (e.g. a square, a square with one corner snipped off, a circle, a half circle, etc.) which you can combine on a grid to form your letters. There are a limited number of shapes, though, so you're also limited in what you can create. You can view and download other people's fonts for free.[7] However, the makers of FontStruct use this feature to tease you with fancy-looking fonts which are not free.[8] You can, however, export your fonts (or fonts you've borrowed from others) as .ttf files.
Recently I discovered that the vector editing program, Inkscape, can also be used to produce fonts. There's a pretty good tutorial at this YouTube video. However, she neglects to tell you that your canvas should be 1000px × 1000px and that the baseline (the blue line she mentions) should be 200px from the bottom of the canvas.[9] And for your convenience, here is the website where you convert your .svg files to .ttf (TrueType Font) files. Also note that this produces a monospaced type. I'm not sure how to convert those to variable-spaced type.
Notes:
[1] You can see some of my doodles here and here.
[2] Side note as a footnote: There is a documentary, called Helvetica, which is basically just a puff piece promoting that font. However, many of the signs that they show as examples of the ubiquity and propriety of Helvetica are actually composed in the very similar Arial font. I think that's hilarious.
[3] To learn more about the difference between bitmap (raster) images and vector images and the software used to edit them, see my post Raster Graphics and Vector Graphics.
[4] Download for a free 30-day trial here (this is v.6.2, which doesn't allow you to save; v.5.6, here, lets you save, but has fewer features). After that it's ~$80 to purchase.
[5] If you're unaware what kerning is, see my post Some Typographical Considerations (scroll down to the last heading).
[6] There is a free alternative, which looks pretty similar, called FontForge (available for Windows or Mac here). I haven't tried it, though, so I can't recommend or review it. I'm daunted by the fact that you have to run it on a Linux emulator (called cygwin, available here). cygwin is command line and I don't like bothering with that. And the plugins that were required to run FontForge were not straightforward.
[7] There are privacy settings, though. So if you don't want anyone else looking at or downloading your font creations, you can hide them from everyone else.
[8] You'll want to download them so you can see how they made a particular shape, but then you discover that you have to buy them. Grr. I suspect, however, that the fonts they're selling weren't even made with FontStruct. They look much too intricate.
[9] Only letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, and y) should pass below this baseline. The rest should sit snugly on top of it.
The first one that I found was called FontCreator [4], by a company called High-Logic. This was my first experience with vector graphics, though I didn't know it at the time. This was also my first experience with kerning.[5] It took me a while to learn my way around the software, but eventually I got up and running and designed a few fonts and exported them as .ttf files before my trial subscription ran out. One nice thing about FontCreator is that it can generate kerning pairs for you instead of making you do them all manually. However, unless you work really fast and have a limited number of font ideas (or want to fork out some money), this might not meet all of your needs.[6]
Later on I was introduced to a website called FontStruct (which can be seen here). FontStruct is free to use, you just have to log in to use it and save your font creations. Unlike FontCreator, where you draw the curves that make each letter, FontStruct provides you with basic shapes (e.g. a square, a square with one corner snipped off, a circle, a half circle, etc.) which you can combine on a grid to form your letters. There are a limited number of shapes, though, so you're also limited in what you can create. You can view and download other people's fonts for free.[7] However, the makers of FontStruct use this feature to tease you with fancy-looking fonts which are not free.[8] You can, however, export your fonts (or fonts you've borrowed from others) as .ttf files.
Recently I discovered that the vector editing program, Inkscape, can also be used to produce fonts. There's a pretty good tutorial at this YouTube video. However, she neglects to tell you that your canvas should be 1000px × 1000px and that the baseline (the blue line she mentions) should be 200px from the bottom of the canvas.[9] And for your convenience, here is the website where you convert your .svg files to .ttf (TrueType Font) files. Also note that this produces a monospaced type. I'm not sure how to convert those to variable-spaced type.
Notes:
[1] You can see some of my doodles here and here.
[2] Side note as a footnote: There is a documentary, called Helvetica, which is basically just a puff piece promoting that font. However, many of the signs that they show as examples of the ubiquity and propriety of Helvetica are actually composed in the very similar Arial font. I think that's hilarious.
[3] To learn more about the difference between bitmap (raster) images and vector images and the software used to edit them, see my post Raster Graphics and Vector Graphics.
[4] Download for a free 30-day trial here (this is v.6.2, which doesn't allow you to save; v.5.6, here, lets you save, but has fewer features). After that it's ~$80 to purchase.
[5] If you're unaware what kerning is, see my post Some Typographical Considerations (scroll down to the last heading).
[6] There is a free alternative, which looks pretty similar, called FontForge (available for Windows or Mac here). I haven't tried it, though, so I can't recommend or review it. I'm daunted by the fact that you have to run it on a Linux emulator (called cygwin, available here). cygwin is command line and I don't like bothering with that. And the plugins that were required to run FontForge were not straightforward.
[7] There are privacy settings, though. So if you don't want anyone else looking at or downloading your font creations, you can hide them from everyone else.
[8] You'll want to download them so you can see how they made a particular shape, but then you discover that you have to buy them. Grr. I suspect, however, that the fonts they're selling weren't even made with FontStruct. They look much too intricate.
[9] Only letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, and y) should pass below this baseline. The rest should sit snugly on top of it.
I'm a fan of FontForge; it errs on the side of comprehensiveness rather than simplicity, but it can do wonders. A windows build without cygwin (ported by some unknown Japanese guy, trust at your own risk) is available from http://www.geocities.jp/meir000/fontforge/fontforge-mingw_2010_05_18.zip and works fine on my XP virtual machine.
ReplyDeleteI saw the mingw option, but I was wary because the site was in Japanese and was somewhat incomprehensible even after translating it with Google translate. So thanks for the link! I think I might try FontForge out, now.
ReplyDelete