Creating a font from handwriting

This is, roughly, the procedure by which I would like to create a font:

  1. Draw the characters using pen and paper.
  2. Scan in the handwritten characters.
  3. Possibly separate out the individual glyphs using graphics software.
  4. Convert each of these glyphs to lines and/or curves of zero, or near-zero, width. Possibly unnecessary, if I use a sufficiently thin pen in Step 1.
  5. “Clean up” the result of Step 4. For example, the numeral 7 would be made to consist only of straight lines; the numeral 0 would be made symmetrical, though not necessarily a perfect ellipse; and so forth.
  6. Add different amounts of “thickness” to the result of Step 5, giving different weights of font.
  7. For the italics, go back and do the same thing over again, this time in what can best be described as cursive minus joiners.

What I am trying to do, really, is create a font (or family of fonts) based on my handwriting. I certainly do not intend the characters to have a “handwritten” look to them.

To make things clear:

The subtraction below this text is a sample of my handwriting. Just as many typefaces imitate handwriting, my handwriting appears (on a good day, at least) to imitate a typeface. My goal is to (re)construct that typeface.

How would I go about doing this? Is FontCreator up to the task? (If not, I intend to put in a feature request.)
subtraction.gif

Yes, FontCreator is the best tool to create a set of typefaces based on your handwriting. You would probably need the Glyph Transformation tools in the Pro Edition to make different weights from your first font.

Scanning an Entire Alphabet and copy/paste to FontCreator from your favourite graphics editor is fairly quick.

Smoothing the outlines is what takes most of the time, then adjusting the spacing to get the font looking right.

My Hattha Font started life as handwriting drawn with a felt-tip pen, but I decided it wasn’t really good enough to be worth the effort of maintaining, so I took it down from my font site. I have attached it to the linked thread so that you can see what can be done with FontCreator, and a lot of patience. I created only one style with the pen.

The italic version shown there was created from the regular with a transform script, then some glyphs like lowercase f were modified to suit italics. The bold was created from the regular, then the bold italic from the bold, again using transform scripts to do most of the hard work automatically.