Programs for creating fonts. A beautiful font. Creating a font from your handwriting

The readability of any test is very often determined to a rather high degree by the font used to write it. Many users do not want to be satisfied with what modern text editors offer , but try to create their own fonts. However, there are many problems in the process, if you do not take into account some important points. Creating your own beautiful font is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. Therefore, try to consider some of the nuances associated with this painstaking work.

How to create a beautiful font: setting a task

First of all, at the initial stage, the main goals should be clearly defined. Whether the font will be created for academic publications, comics or entertainment projects - this largely determines the main stages of the work.

Next, determine how the font should look like and whether it fits into the future project (chopped, serif font, characters with the correct geometry, and finally, whether the font is based on the designer's own handwriting), how well it will look in long documents , And not just in the headlines.

Naturally, you should consider how the characters will be visually perceived when zoomed. Also, pay attention to the type of font in the whole document. Of course, some simple program can be used to change the font of an existing font, but most experts do not recommend using other fonts as a basis, because if you want to achieve originality, such tools are not suitable for work (except for understanding the basics of editing).

First stage

The creation of chopped letters is considered more complicated, so to begin with it is better to do handwriting. The program for creating a font from your handwriting can be used at later stages, and at the very beginning it is recommended to draw a few characters from the hand, and then compose a combination of them and see how it will look in general terms.

This approach allows you to immediately assess many of the shortcomings, because the handwriting can be very specific and highly individual, and not all readers of future texts will be able to read it. Uncomfortable reading can potentially alienate the reader.

In the simplest case, you can even just take photos for letters, and then from them make up words or combinations (on a computer or manually from natural shots).

The first letters

Computer processing and programs for creating fonts to implement immediately do not need. It should start with the creation of two, it is believed, the main letter. These are uppercase Latin letters "n" and "o", and the capital letters "O" and "H".

Some experts in this area recommend using a combination of "adhension" (or "adhencion"). It is believed that the creation of sequences of these characters by hand in the early stages of developing the future font allows you to fully understand the geometry and proportions of each letter, digit or symbol.

In the future, this will simplify the task of drawing characters already in the computer program. But it's better to draw them by hand first, since without certain knowledge on the computer, creating smooth lines or transitions will be quite problematic.

Programs for creating fonts: transferring the font to the computer

But, let's say, the font is created, and while some specific program for creating a hand-written font was not used. The next step is to transfer the font to the computer environment. Needless to say, this will require a scanner and related software.

And for these purposes you can use a lot of applications, but all those who have encountered similar software packages, as a rule, recommend using Adobe Illustrator - a program that is universal in all respects. It is advisable to paint the drawn symbols first with a bright marker, and then also make the edging with a handle to smooth the shapes.

But after all, not all novice designers have practically the skills of working with this application, since the program for beginners is considered quite difficult to master. Therefore, a good, though not new, application called FontLab Studio is perfect.

Despite some obsolescence, the application has in its arsenal quite a number of professional-level modules, including the Bizet drawing tools, the glyph viewer in two-dimensional space, and not just in horizontal planes, all sorts of automatic converters and font fusion. In addition, this software product supports most of the known font formats (TrueType, ASCII Unix, Open TrueType, Mac TrueType), as well as developments created with the same Adobe Illustrator in the formats BMP, AI, TIFF, EPS, etc.

If you do not want to draw yourself ...

In this situation, the user perfectly suits the utility BirdFont - a small program to create your own font, as they say, from scratch.

Despite its simplicity, the application has an excellent tool set, where you can separately mark the drawing of characters or symbols with a link to a geometric grid, create glyphs over existing images, automatically convert characters to vector form, enhance the ability to import fonts and add metadata.

If you want to make a project based on your own handwriting, you can resort to using the FontCreator application. The program is quite easy to learn and has good capabilities not only for creating, but also for testing fonts, even with the reference to a standard PCI keyboard with different layouts.

Testing the font

Finally, the font is created and processed for later use. In the next stage, first you should pay attention to how characters in one word, line, paragraph or in full text will look in terms of its readability.

In addition, it is worth trying to change the size of the text and evaluate how well it looks in different scaling options. Almost all programs for creating fonts have such capabilities, but it's better to just print the text and see for yourself. Sheet with printed text in different sizes can be hung on the wall and look at it from afar or near to analyze the shortcomings. It is even more desirable to send some text to friends or friends, so that they can appreciate the work, because the author, as a rule, has only his own personal opinion and perception of what he has done.

Which programs are better to use?

Now it remains to look at the most popular programs for creating fonts, which are mostly used by professional designers and ordinary users. Among all the variety that is currently offered in the market of computer technologies, the following software products are worth mentioning separately:

• FontLab Studio;
• FontCreator;
• BirdFont;
• Fontographer;
• FontForge;
• Type 3.2 font editor;
• FontStruct;
• BitFontMaker2;
• Fontifier;
• YourFonts;
• Glyphr;
• IFontMaker;
• FontArk;
• MyScriptFont, etc.

In this list you can find programs for creating fonts in Russian, free and paid utilities. Yes, and according to the possibilities, they vary considerably. So you have to choose, based on your own considerations, needs or testing applications in the work.

Instead of the total

As you can understand from all of the above, the process of creating your own font on one hand looks quite simple (when using programs), and on the other - requires a display of imagination and perseverance. Here, emphasis was placed on developing your own font, rather than processing the existing one, since the creative approach from the designer always looks more interesting than copying something that has already happened. I would like to hope that these simple tips will help all beginners to comprehend all the stages in the development of their projects. Well, programs for creating fonts - this is the second thing. The main thing is the original idea of the creator himself, so to speak, a creative approach to solving the task. And this, as you know, is welcomed in the first place.