Are many people out there making their own fonts for their kits etc? Are there any good preferably free programs for this that someone can suggest? I don't know the first thing about making fonts - can I convert a scanned image of my handwriting into a font fairly easily?? I realise there are plenty of businesses making a dollar out of converting handwriting, but I'd like to have a play of my own!

Thanks guys!

Anna

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I would love to know this as well! I understand that it is a time-consuming process but other than that I have no clue.
I was amazed that professional fonts range in price though.. from free to hundreds of dollars. Great question!!

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Dani B.

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well of course I had to google this since I was curious too. I came up with a result that will do it for you for $9 which seems pretty reasonable. It's called Fontifier. You can preview your font for free and you only have to pay if you want to download it. There's also something called "BitFont" that will let you create your own font online and download it for free.

Several months back I used the Fontifier site to make up my own handwriting font. I like it! I just wish I would have used a heavier tip pen when I wrote out my letters. They're a little scratchy at about 12pt or less.
I really wanted to get my own handwriting in a font because I missed MY writing on my scrapbook pages. Really, I'm not in LOVE with my writing - just know the importance of my kiddos seeing it later on.

OK. I've done some searching of my own and come up with a likely candidate on SourceForge (I love SourceForge! ) It is called FontForge, you can find its project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/fontforge/. I haven't had a chance to play yet, but from what I've read it should:

- Install on Windows, Mac or Linux. Windows installation looks putsy as you have to set up Cygwin etc, but a small price to pay for free software.
- Provide basic font editing capabilities - including ability to import a graphic to trace to help creating your characters (eg the scanned handwriting)
- There is autotrace functionality but it looks like a seperate download/install.

If anyone has a chance to play and has any feedback, I'd love to hear it! I'll have to wait til the weekend to have a go

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I love source forge too. I'm a big fan of open source and community contributions. I'll have to check it out.

Just learning about open source programs, very interesting! Will have to check this one out, thanks for sharing!!

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Dani B.

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Most of us today use TrueType fonts which are made using vectors rather then being a raster type image. This is a good thing as resizing the type does not effect it's quality this way.

When I want to make a new font or even edit an existing font I use Dave Emmet's nifty little program called Softy. It works like a charm and is not a memory hog on your system. There is no installation needed and the program is only 254K in size.


It is shareware so you can try it out and buy later if you like it.