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.