Denyer's Homepage

30-Dec-2009  >  How easy is it to make a font of your own handwriting?

Categories  >  Software 

Easier (and cheaper) than it used to be, thanks to www.fontcapture.com — a project created by Hakon Bertheussen that works on the principle of printing off a grid, writing onto it and transforming a scan into a TrueType font. This is a free online tool, so it's limited by how long the author wants to keep the site available, but there are a few pay sites working on the same principle for around $10-15 and pricier offline alternatives include Scanahand by High Logic and ScanHand (very original names, these) by FontLab — but where's the fun in that?

There are a few drawbacks to the grid method. It's very easy to end up with letter sizes that are out of scale with each other, and the tool only converts some of the characters you might need to make a font that'll work reasonably well with, say, Microsoft Word's "Replace text as you type" functionality. However, it's a very good starting point to produce a font that can be edited to fill in the gaps, and FontForge is a nifty free editor that'll enable you do just that. I seem to remember that the last time I looked at this (a good few years ago) the only way to get it running was using Cygwin, which essentially emulates enough of Linux to let software run under Windows without significant rewrites, and is a chunky download. Fortunately now someone's come up with an alternative single package that doesn't require fiddling.

---

SITE UPDATE  >  21-Oct-2009

Factored site updates into the blog, and added an RSS feed. Started a layout update.

---

POSTSCRIPT  >  Browsers and usage

Feel free to use any original content that's mine non-commercially provided you credit. A link would also be appreciated. Unless you're Slashdot/etc. in which case just copy the content, ta very much.

This site gets tested with Gecko / Trident / Presto / Lynx / WebKit
but generally I use Firefox or Opera myself and 'fix' anything the older Microsoft browsers render particularly badly.