Poppy wrote:By making fonts with scanhand how will the fonts look? will thay look like this (&, ^, *, %) or will they look just like your hand writing?
I want to make fonts for music.
Some years ago, in 2003, I produced some fonts for percussion music. I am not a musician, these are not expert fonts, just some fun. The fonts were made with the Softy program, which was the fontmaking program with which I started making fonts, before I used FontCreator.
If you would like to try the following font.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CPMUSICA.TTF
(side note)
If you do open the font, there are lots of copies of an unusual black shape displayed by fontviewer amongst the characters. This is because the font only has glyphs for some character positions, not for others. The unusual black shape is just my own design for a .notdef glyph. Most fonts have a black rectangle if someone keys a character for which the font does not have a glyph: most of my fonts have my own design for a .notdef glyph, either that one or something similar. It is simply that I think that it stands out better than a rectangle.
(end of side note)
There are some notes about the font and some related fonts about halfway down the following web page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7001.htm
That web page is not my present main font page, it is an earlier page.
For the font mentioned above, the notes are as follows.
The following font has glyphs encoded as characters from the ordinary keyboard. It is not a Unicode compatible font. This font is provided so that people who wish to produce artwork for making illustrations, such as by printing a page directly from a wordprocessor or by using the Microsoft Paint program to produce graphics files, can easily have access to the character glyphs for those purposes.
If the font is used with the following characters, in WordPad or Paint, then graphics can be produced. The encoding scheme used is my own, I made it up. You could encode your own font as you choose.
e Empty staff line.
p Percussion clef symbol.
i Individual note.
d Double note.
r Left hand part of centre part of whole bar rest.
s Right hand part of centre part of whole bar rest.
u Left hand part of half bar rest.
v Right hand part of half bar rest.
q Quarter bar rest.
space Unit width space.
b Bar line.
For example, I produced the following graphic back in 2003.
- A graphic produced using the font that is in the CPMUSICA.TTF file.
- font7004.gif (2.5 KiB) Viewed 15750 times
So, it is possible to make a font for music using a fontmaking program.
However, it may not be possible to get good results using Scanahand. I am not familiar with the latest version of Scanahand, yet feel that for a music font, the ability to have a glyph touching the next glyph to its right and/or to its left would be important. The early version of Scanahand did not work like that, it automatically added white space to the left and to the right of the glyph. That is good for a font made for handwriting, yet could cause problems for a font made for music.
The FontCreator program would allow you to produce a music font. It would be possible to make it look handwritten by scanning handwritten artwork and then importing the graphics file into FontCreator. The artwork could then be trimmed and adjusted in FontCreator. However, using handwritten artwork could produce alignment problems for the horizontal lines of the music, so it might be better, if a handwritten look is desired, to construct the horizontal lines within FontCreator as if doing technical drawing and then to superimpose the handwritten notes. The effect could be as if someone has bought some printed music paper and had then handwritten music notes upon it. Several tries and some experiments of scaling the handwritten artwork so as to get a good effect may be necessary in order to get a good result, yet FontCreator would allow you the flexibility to experiment.
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
8 July 2010