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Font of Knowledge

One of dad's requests when designing his new "Manitoulin Island Sketch Book" was that he wanted to have the text written in his own handwriting. I know that technically it would be nearly impossible to get a good quality, readable reproduction from a regular scan of handwritten text. However, I recalled reading an article many, many moons ago about software that allows one to convert scanned glyphs into regular font files. This, of course, allows for a much higher print quality than just a standard scan. However, I couldn't remember the name of the actual software and even my well-honed Google search skillz couldn't turn up anything in the way of easy to use and affordable font creation software.

Eventually, I dug back through my records and discovered that software I was looking for was created by a company called "Fontlab", which, fortunately, was still in the business!

After reading through the descriptions of the various pieces of software from Fontland, I decided on a combination of ScanFont 5 and Type Tool 3.

Basically, Scanfont allows you to scan a page of glyphs and assign them to letter positions in your font, while Type Tool is used to finalize the glyphs, correct problems, set kerning and basically do everything required to create new fonts. Given the complexity of creating fonts, I found both programs surprising easy to pick up, just a couple of references to their respective manuals to clear up confusion over esoteric font terms and I was ready to go. In the end, I would estimate that it took me about a 8 hours in total to take samples of my dad's hand writing and convert it to the two original fonts we used for the Sketch Book, which is pretty good efficiency for starting off with no font foundry experience what-so-ever!!!

Time allowing, I will hopefully be able to post some of my original font creations for download, in the meantime, I wholeheartedly recommend Fontlab products to anyone who's ever been interested in creating their own fonts!

P.S. As a bonus, here's a great little tool for identifying mystery fonts: What The Font?!

Posted by Dylon on September 3, 2008 10:01 PM | Permalink

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