: Building hand-written fonts for lettering I am looking to build a custom font from my handwriting for lettering a comic. what professional tools exist to build such a font and export it into

@Harper654

See also Glyphtracer:


Glyphtracer takes an image of letters. It detects all letter forms and
allows the user to tag them. They are then vectorised and passed on to
Fontforge for fine tuning.

launchpad.net/glyphtracer

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@Rambettina927

Here's my typical workflow. I use this for regular families I've sketched out and handwritten type.


Scan your sketches and break up the individual characters (and versions of characters)
Set-up a template doc to do your vectorizing that will align with your font building tool (there are certain dimensions that will have to line up in the end depending on your chosen font app)
Use AI (Inkscape might work to) to autotrace the drawings (AI can do a very nice job if you adjust the settings carefully).
Clean up the auto-traces if needed/desired
Import into your font app (FontLab is excellent but, you'll probably need one of the other suggestions for budget's sake)
Extra credit: Build in OpenType programming to do randomized character selection and ligatures for convincing handwritten type (some Python scripting might be in order for the randomization)


This forum is a great resource for further questions: Typophile > Build

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@Sims5801359

Fontlab's TypeTool is a cheaper Windows/|Mac alternative to their full-featured FontLab Studio, which might be of interest if you find FontForge's interface an issue.

It's US, although I managed to find an older version as a magazine giveaway and upgraded to the latest version for about US.

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@Reiling762

You're welcome to try yourfonts.com. Unfortunately they are no longer in their free BETA, but it doesn't hurt to try (you can preview your font before you buy). In the past I've made fonts with my own handwriting using this website with pretty good results. This is a much faster method to making each character digitally, of course, this method will probably not be as accurate as doing it digitally.

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@Murray664

There are a number of fairly inexpensive services that will do this for you. A quick Google search turned up this one, but I've seen others.

That said, I have to agree with those who suggested fontforge. The interface can be a little weird to get used to, but converting your handwriting to a font is fairly easy to do with it. I'm not a typography expert by any stretch, but I did it for fun about six months ago. I just used a template similar to the one on the yourfonts site to help with sizing and then imported the scan of each letter into fontforge.

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@Connie430

I can assure you that FontForge can do everything that FontLab can, with the exception of two things (that come to mind right now): fancy visual Truetype hinting tools, and support of the UFO format that's widely used by script collections like RoboFab, Superpolator etc. That said, FontForge has a fine and useful Python API itself, which could be used for the same purpose. FontForge does, however, have a much more intuitive interface for writing OT Features and editing things like gasp tables.

FontForge's GUI is, well, special, because George Williams happens to have a dislike for both GTK and Qt. At first it may seem a bit unintuitive, but once you have the keyboard shortcuts down working with FontForge actually becomes very fast.

Also make sure you get the lastest version from SVN and compile it yourself. The binary releases were outdated and buggy (at least last time I checked).

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@Holmes874

FontLab Studio is the heavy hitter. Most pros use it. FontLab also took over Fontographer (what most folks used back in the day) and have updated it. That's likely a better option for what you need.

On the open source side of the aisle, there's fontForge: fontforge.sourceforge.net/

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@Michele215

If memory serves me correctly, FontLab is still the best option for creating, editing, and outputting font files.

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