DESIGN YOUR OWN FONT FROM SCRATCH

1 Use pen and paper

Take a piece of A4 paper, then carefully write on it all the characters of your font – uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, plus any additional symbols – you wish to include. Space characters out evenly in rows across the page. Once you’ve done this, scan the image using Document Image’s Text option and save it as a PNG file.

2 Clean up and convert

Open your scanned image into an image editor such as Glimpse. First, choose Image>Mode>Indexed, select ‘Use black and white (1-bit) palette’ and click Convert. Next, zoom into the image and use the paint brush (white colour) to erase any mistakes or small marks. Finally, choose File>Export to save the image in PNG format.

3 Import into Glyphtracer

Open Glyphtracer. You’ll be prompted to name your font and select your scanned image (click Browse). Glyphtracer will then set the output file to the same location and name as your input file, albeit with a .sfd extension for importing into FontForge later. You can change this as you see fit. When ready, click Start to begin the import process.

4 Assign characters to glyphs

You’ll see your scan imported and each character enclosed in a box. Next, map these characters to their respective glyphs, starting with lower case characters (if you don’t have any, click ‘latin lower case’ and select ‘latin upper case’ instead). Make a note of the first character listed – ‘a’ – and click the corresponding box as shown.

5 Carry on assigning

The glyph will automatically move on to the next one in the list (‘b’ – 2/26). Click your handwritten ‘b’ and carry on selecting each character as required. If you make a mistake, click Previous glyph and the incorrectly selected character will be highlighted in red – simply click the correct glyph, and then carry on to the next one in your list.

6 Finish and export

Click ‘latin lower case’ to select another group of characters – you’ll see options ranging from upper case and accented letters to numbers, brackets, punctuation, symbols, currency and more. Once you’ve defined all the characters, click ‘Generate SFD file’ to create the file. Once generated, click OK and load the .sfd file into FontForge to finish defining it.