Cool font-making site

[hrj]

I heard about this cool font-making site (yourfonts.com) on the conlangs community and just gave it a test run. The basic idea is that you print out a template page that has spaces for you to write characters on, then you scan it, upload it to the site, and they turn it into a True-type font. I did a test run with just a basic upper and lower case alphabet taken from the Peniarth 20 Brut y Tywysogion (14th c. Welsh book hand) and here's the result.



This is just a rough first attempt -- the spacing is a bit wide, I wasn't as meticulous with the calligraphy as I could have been, and for a serious attempt I'd want to use the extended character set to have fun with some of the alternate letter forms, ligatures, etc. But I've been looking for an easy font-generation program to play with ever since I messed around with one called Font Monger back a decade or so ago. This could be quite a lot of fun.

By the way, the site is set up to copyright the resulting font to the person who creates it. I'm not quite sure what their business model is (and I did do some research in advance to make sure there weren't any complaints about the site installing spyware or viruses) unless they're directly associated with the font editing software that they suggest at the end of the process (which costs fairly standard software prices).

ETA: Changed the example to jpeg format since there were some format problems in displaying. If you see this note but don't see the text example, please drop a comment so I can trouble-shoot.

Comments

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

Did you upload a jpg or gif? Nothing shows insofar as your font is concerned.

[brooksmoses]

Looks like it's a TIFF file. Which downloads fine from the URL and I can see it in a picture viewer, but most browsers can't display them.

[etfb.livejournal.com]

FTFY (http://pics.livejournal.com/etfb/pic/0004e13c)

(Or, to be less succinct: the format you used, TIFF, doesn't work in every browser. I converted it to PNG for you, and put it up.)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- I generally do everything with jpegs, but the simplest way to get the sample from Word to an uploadable image file was using my screen-capture utility, which apparently only deals in tiffs. Next time I'll do the extra steps of running it through Photoshop to convert it.

[etfb.livejournal.com]

You're on a Mac? There should be something a bit lighter than Photoshop to do that for you -- on my Windoze box I use Irfanview -- but I guess that's my entirely rational fear of Photoshop showing...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there is -- but I use Photoshop often enough for stuff that does need something that heavy-duty that it's my default image editor.

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

Ah good. I can see it now.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

How very cool indeed. (I still have the ability to use fontographer, so I can create my own fonts anyway, but this sounds a lot less painful. Might play with it later.)

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Their automatic letter spacing actually looks fairly consistent to my eye, which is quite an achievement for a free program. The word spacing is a bit inconsistent, and could stand to be a bit wider (depending on whether the period stuff has big or small inter-word spaces). The baseline also looks somewhat wavery. But all in all, it's a good first step.

I, alas, can't use Fontographer any more because it's no longer being updated and hence won't work on either of my computers. I did find a relatively inexpensive program (Type Tool, $99) that does at least *some* of the same things -- I haven't used it much, but it lets you fiddle with character spacing, edit shapes, cut and paste characters from other fonts, and adjust baselines. The only thing I wish it would do that it doesn't is automatically create bold and italic versions -- but for historical fonts you don't really need that anyway.

[aastg.livejournal.com]

Christ, doesn't anybody WRITE any more?

--end of obligatory rant--

Seriously, this looks way too interesting. I shall have to see what it does with 12th c. secretary....