Designing and Creating Custom Fonts?

[larvapuppy]

Hi all. I'm wondering if any of you have experience or tips for creating fonts. Do you know of any software, tutorials etc that will help (preferably free or not subscription-based)? I have no clue how to do this. I'm sure there are others who are interested as well, so I figured I'd post about it here.

I ask because I want to make a new font based on my handwriting. I actually already have a font of my own handwriting, but I used an online service to create it that costs 10 USD and makes you fill out a template. There isn't a way to edit the font as far as I know, and I don't want to spend $10 every time I want to tweak something!  Also, I want my new font to be pixel-art style but still resemble my handwriting, if that makes sense.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Hi.
I messed around once with font forge (https://fontforge.org/en-US/), indeed a free libre open source software; later I also tried some online-editor, I believe it was https://www.glyphrstudio.com/ .

I'm sure both are nice tools, but I didn't get any good results. My flatmate (who is also the gfx-artists for our games) saz that font making is damn difficult, especially getting a good "kerning" is hard.

[TheFrugalGamer]

One I've used is Fontstruct (https://fontstruct.com/), which is online and uses different types of glyphs to create fonts. It's not as full-featured as some font programs, but that makes it easier to use. You can definitely restrict yourself to just the square glyph if you want to create pixel fonts, and I've actually done this to create a few (here's one: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2285129/frugalcrayon as an example). Font making is time consuming no matter what method you use, but it can be a lot of fun if you're interested in the hobby.

[Dibs]

I've used Calligraphr (https://www.calligraphr.com/en/), which I think used to be called MyScriptFont.com to create several handwriting fonts. It's not ideal; you have to pay to get enough characters to be useful (I end up having to drop some punctuation), and you probably need to approach it less slap-dash than I do to get a good result, but it does allow you to edit the letter sizes and kerning before it smashes the font into a .tff file! At least it did last time I used it.
If you're up for paying a small fee ($8 per month), it seems like it could be powerful with all the features unlocked.

For pixelated fonts, consider drafting them in an art program (even just mspaint!) at low resolution (to achieve pixelation) and then putting them into the template at a larger scale.
I know many professional font makers use apps like Adobe Illustrate, though I can't in good conscience recommend Adobe to anyone. Mostly the emphasis is on vector-based stuff. May or may not be useful for handwriting.

[AY38910]

One I've used is Fontstruct (https://fontstruct.com/), which is online and uses different types of glyphs to create fonts. It's not as full-featured as some font programs, but that makes it easier to use. You can definitely restrict yourself to just the square glyph if you want to create pixel fonts, and I've actually done this to create a few (here's one: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2285129/frugalcrayon as an example). Font making is time consuming no matter what method you use, but it can be a lot of fun if you're interested in the hobby.

I have a friend who uses that, also yes, he does mostly pixel fonts.

[loren]

pixel-art style but still resemble my handwriting

a free, simple, web-based option for making pixel fonts is BitFontMaker2! it doesn't have as many features as the other font-making software shared above, but the simplicity makes it more approachable, i think! the site includes a gallery of fonts made with the tool. here are some that are meant to look like handwriting!

[IndigoGolem]

Making fonts is hard. There are plenty of online places for people who make them*. FontForge is free and very powerful, but with that power comes a whole lot of confusing menus and options. Michael Harmon on YouTube has some tutorials for it. There's also the official docs, which i think do an alright job for how much there is to cover.

My process every time i've tried to start one is to draw glyphs†, either on paper or in Inkscape. SVG files from Inkscape can be imported into FontForge, i find the former's editor a lot easier to use. You can also import background images as a reference.

Since you want a font based on your handwriting, what i suggest doing is writing lines on paper (or whatever medium makes your handwriting look best) then scanning that paper and tracing the best looking letters in Inkscape. Make sure you include every character that you want your font to have. So the whole alphabet in both cases (assuming you want a font for English), punctuation marks, numerals, and symbols like the ampersand. Pangrams‡ are one way to make sure you at least have the full alphabet.

If you want it to not just be based on your handwriting but actually look handwritten, you'll want several glyphs for each letter and you'll have to set up the font to replace the standard forms with other ones based on context in a way that looks random. Like was done by this guy.

I've never made a pixel (or bitmap) font. FontForge does support bitmap fonts.

* Reddit has r/fontforge, fonts, typography, and neography. Probably more too. Lemmy also has some.
† A glyph is a single appearance of a character. "a" and "b" are different letters and different glyphs. "f" and "F" are the same letter but different characters and different glyphs, though you could make a font where they share the same glyph. And ligatures are an example of one character having multiple glyphs. The I in "fi" might look different than when it's not next to an F in a font that has a separate glyph for that combination of characters.
‡ A pangram is a sentence with every letter of the alphabet in it. Some English examples are "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and "sphinx of blæckeſt quartz, doþ ðou judge my vow riȝtly?"