Making fonts is often thought of as a laborious process requiring hours of work with expensive and difficult to use software, but this does not need to be the case. It is possible to make a font that looks cool in under an hour by following this simple guide.
What Font Making Software is Best?
Because fonts require a specialist file system that describes how it should be displayed on the screen or printed by a printer, producing the required instructions by hand is difficult and time-consuming. It is far easier to download font creation software that will take all of the hard work out of the creation process, leaving only the fun design work to do.
The two most popular software packages are Font Creator and Scanahand, both produced by High-Logic. Font Creator is a powerful tool for detailed font creation; allowing every aspect of the creation process to be manipulated by hand. It gives very impressive results if enough time is spent with it, but for a lay person, it's like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Thankfully, Scanahand is a lot simpler to use. It comes with a set of printable templates to fill in which, when scanned or loaded back into the software, will generate a font quickly and easily. This guide will therefore focus on how to create a True Type font in Scanahand.
How to Design a Font
Firstly, print out the required template from Scanahand. There are five templates as standard: Basic, Basic and Extended, Symbol and Greek. For a font that only requires standard English letters and numbers, choose the “Basic” template. For fonts including the extended European alphabet characters such as “â” and “ë”, choose “Basic and Extended”.
Once the templates are printed, designing the font is a simple matter of drawing the required symbols in each of the boxes. Each box contains four lines on either side, which correspond to positions on the screen for the purposes of lining up each letter or symbol. As a general rule, the uppermost line will be the highest point of any letter in the font, while the lowest line is the lowest point a low-hanging lower-case letter such as “g”, “j” or “p” will touch.
In order to get a font that can be read easily by the human eye, it is important to make each letter line up well with these lines. When designing each letter, try to stick as closely to the four guidelines as possible; drawing uppercase letters between line one (the topmost line) and line three (the lowest-but-one line). Lowercase letters should be drawn between the middle lines; except for the low-hanging letters, which should be drawn with their low-hanging parts between the third and fourth lines.
If the extended template is being used, accented letters should have their accents above line one for capitals and between lines one and two for lowercase letters. This allows for the accents to be displayed in a legible manner without the need to squash the letters themselves in order to make room.
Once the templates have been filled in, either scan them and save them as .jpegs with whatever software is preferable and familiar and load them into Scanahand; or use its in-built scanning facility to import the templates. It should be noted that Scanahand's in-built facility is not fully compatible with older scanners, so importing the templates with another program may be preferable.
The option to load or scan templates is located on the Step Two screen, accessed from the three “Step” buttons on the left of the window.
Installing Fonts
One the templates are loaded, click on the “Generate” button on the Step Three screen. The precise amount of time required to create the font will depend on the number of pages in the selected template and the speed of the computer being used, but it should take no more than about five minutes on an average system.
Clicking “Generate” brings up a window asking for the name of the font. Give the font a descriptive and recognisable name so it can be found amongst all the other fonts installed on the system.
When the font is created, it can be saved or installed. It is advisable to do both, as this will create a file that can then be backed-up. The “Install” button will place a copy of the font into the Windows font folder, after which it can be used like any other font already installed. Mac OS X users can also install the font by loading the .ttf file created by the “Save” function with Font Book (part of OS X) and selecting “Install Font”.
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