How long?

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Support
1

Hello

I’ve found a font referred to on this forum cvalled JARDOTTY. Essentially a dotted handwritten font for kids to use to learn to write. It’s not quite what I want but it’s pretty much the same sort of thing as I want to do for my kids.

Four questions:

  1. Can font creator easily create such a ‘dotted’ or ‘dashed’ font?
  2. How long would it take a computer literate but font ILLITERATE person to create a full font like JARDOTTY, importantly, FROM SCRATCH?
  3. Once the TTF font is created in upper and lower case does it automatically come in bold, itallic, full pitch to 72pt and underlined versions in Windows?
  4. Can numbers be created such that they are vertically aligned eg for addition and subtraction printing?

many thanks in advance for any and all help

2

  1. If you can draw the font with a felt-tip pen, Font Creator can easily make a font from scanned images. See the My First Font tutorial

  2. Weeks rather than days, maybe months if you want to do a proper job, but not years.

  3. Bold can usually be created automatically. Oblique (slanted) is easy too, but a true italic font needs different shapes, like ƒ instead of f. All fonts can be underlined automatically. You can define the thickness and position of underline and strikeout in Font Creator. Truetype fonts are fully scalable from tiny to as big as your paper can fit. You can (and generally should) design the numerals and currency symbols to be the same width. The professional version of Font Creator has a Glyph Transformation feature that will centre glyphs within the character cell. Glyph Transformer is also needed to make bold, light, oblique, or outline versions of your fonts.

3

thank you

weeks!, blimey.

Why is it so time consuming? I would be scanning something in and then tinkering with 52 letters + 10 numbers. Surely that’s not too tricky?

Not a criticism of anyone’s software I’m just asking before I get into too large a project to back out of! I imagine other packages are the same or more time consuming.

thanks

markg

4

The key phrase is if you want to do a proper job. There are tons of free fonts that you can download, but few that stand up to scrutiny. 52 letters and 10 numbers, and then you need punctuation. See the recommended glyphs. I’m not trying to put you off, just warning you that you might have to do a lot more work than you bargained for. Who is the font for? Do you want to sell it, or share it freely with teachers?

This software is as good as it gets. Learning other programs would take a lot longer. If you know nothing about font editing then you have a lot to learn to make sure your font not only works, but looks correctly spaced horizontally and vertically, is not too light so that it disappears at small sizes etc.

Sure, you can cobble something together in a day, but no one else will want to use it. You get a free 30 day trial of the full professional version, so why not try it and see?

5

thank you for the v useful response.

a few quickeis as final follow up please, i settle for a demo font to start off with …

  1. take your point about glyphs .. the period comes out blank! Can I use a font template and just CHANGE the ones that I want?
  2. I assume a ttf works on a MAC as well?
  3. My first effort was actually visible at 8pt so i was pleased with that! lol
  4. I think i followed the tutorial but the resultant character spacing is inconsistent. Is each character the same width? should it be? I assume it shouldn’t. Should the character that is pasted in be centred or left aligned as the demo implies? When Ileft aligned it really didn’t look good.


    many thanks again
    markg
6

ADDENDUM

  1. AS IT OVERLAPPED WITH PREVIOUS CHARACTERS
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From the View Menu, Toolbars, select the Comparison toolbar. Click the checkbox to display comparison characters before and after the current character like this:
comparison.png
Characters don’t need to be the same width. In most fonts, the m is wider than the i or l. Only the digits and currency symbols should all be the same width in most fonts.

Italic or handwritten fonts often need the glyph to be offset to the right of the character cell, but approximately centred my be more suitable for most fonts. Using the comparison toolbar you can adjust the glyph’s position within the cell to align with the previous character, and adjust the right side bearing to align with the next character.

When moving closed glyphs like “o” which has two contours, or “B” which has three, use Control A to select all contours before trying to move the glyph. Hold down shift to constrain movement to horizontal movement only

Use the Cursor keys to move it in 10 funit steps. Hold down control to move the glyph in 1 funit steps.

Edit the glyph properties (Alter Enter) to fine-tune the advance wdith.