I have never created a font. I have never used FontCreator. In fact, I haven’t yet bought it. I am posting here to see if what I want to do can be done easily or if I’m getting in over my head. I want to take an existing font – Eurostile Bold to be exact – and create a distressed version of it. I do not want to sell the font. I am working on a design project whereby parts of it will be in Eurostile Bold and parts in Eurostile Bold Distressed. I want the characters to remain pretty much solid, but the edges to be irregular, similar perhaps to the way typewriter type edges are irregular. (If such a font already exists, please point me to it.) What would be involved in such a project? I suppose I need to bring up each character to the screen and mess up the edges one-by-one. Is that right? (Please tell me that someone has already done this.)
It’s too hard to distress fonts on purpose.
Font Creator is adept at taking an image and making it into a perfect font but you have to have the correct (distressed) image to begin with to end up where you want to be.
I might print a small image of Eurostile Bold and scan it at very low resolution or on thin paper or something and hope that stressing it this way would ruin the crispness of the letters! It can be fed back into Font Creator to build a font of your own.
Do try one of the font sites. http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/ or http://www.identifont.com or http://www.dafont.com to give you names of fonts that might work for your project.
There is a Glyph Transformation to move nodes at Random. This will produce a distressed effect.
Verdana Distressed.png
To be honest, unless this font effect is something that you want to use frequently, it would probably be easier to create the effect in a drawing application. Serif™ DrawPlus has a Roughen tool to produce this kind of effect. I suspect that an expert user can adjust the effect to produce just the distressed effect that you need.
Verdana Roughened.png