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The ultimate ego-type
July 28, 2008
Did you ever imagine that your own handwriting could be available on your computer as a font?
There are a handful of reasons to have a font of your own handwriting, not the least of which is to fill-in forms in a way that looks like handwriting. The best reason of all is ego. It’s mostly useless, but it’s cool.
There are thousands of alternatives to making a font of your own “hand,” and many of them can be found online in the many free font web sites (see the
handwriting font archive). The simple truth is that you can probably find a free font online that is close enough to your own handwriting that it’s unnecessary to indulge your desire to have your own handwriting converted into a font.
If, on the other hand (excuse the on-going puns), there are several online services that will convert your handwriting into a computer font for money. The process requires you to fill-in a form with your handwriting, then to scan the form, and submit it to the font service. These companies use software to convert your hand-written characters (called
glyphs, by the way) into characters, and then assemble them into a functional font. Two of the companies that provide this service are
Fontifier and
vLetter.
The other approach is the one I took. I drew several versions of my handwriting on napkins while flying to Germany last year. Then I photographed the napkins using my digital camera (I could have used a scanner, but I didn’t have one with me). Then, using Adobe Illustrator’s Template function, I traced each letter as carefully as I could in-flight. Several hours later I had a pretty good collections of glyphs.
These are the capital letters from my handwriting drawn on an airline napkin.
Then, just as I do when I am making a “serious” font, I copied, scaled, and pasted each glyph into FontLab software and built my handwriting font. This took several days of work, an exercise in futility mostly, but I had some time to tinker while I was traveling.
…and these are some of the letters I drew in Adobe Illustrator by tracing over the handwriting on the napkin.
There a many more than 52 characters in the alphabet! A lot of beginning font designers draw the caps and the lower case, and then give up. Many more design alphabet, the numerals, the period and the comma, and then give up. But most give up. It’s just too much work. In even the simplest font there are 240 glyphs. That includes the alphabet and numerals, the accents, all of the the underscores, hyphens, dashes, exclamation marks, and more. It takes hours and hours and hours. I have one (as yet unfinished) font that I have been perfecting for over nine months.
In his book,
Learn FontLab Studio, Leslie Cabarga quotes a famous type designer (though I can’t find the reference this evening) as saying that the difference between a free font and a commercial font is
six weeks.
So, armed with the aforementioned 240 glyphs, all properly placed into FontLab, and properly spaced, one begins the
really difficult part of font design:
kerning. To make a successful font, one must build hundreds and hundreds of kerning pairs – sets of two letters that get extraordinary spacing. The obvious pairs are To, Ta, WA, VA, etc. The not-so-obvious are
everything against the wordspace, all of the common pairs with accented vowels, and
everything with an apostrophe or double-quotes after it.
In a font I’m working on right now, I have created 886 kerning pairs so far, and I am getting pretty close to finishing. Fortunately, FontLab has some kerning tools that make the process easier than typing every conceivable pair of letters on the screen. I only takes a few weeks to put the kerning pairs in.
And, then there is
hinting! In the FontLab Studio manual, which is about 900 pages, there are
498 pages devoted to hinting. I’ll tell you more about that in another blog.
Right now I have to get back to work on my 887th kerning pair!
Posted by Brian Lawler on July 28, 2008 | Comments (1)
