Making Fonts

[zourtney]

I thought it would be an interesting idea to try and create a font from my own crappy handwriting. It sounds pretty lame, but I know at least one other board member who has toyed with the idea. The results are, as of now, unimpressive but I have figured out a method to do it. [It seems I'm often more interested in proof-of-concept than finished products...  ]



The process is relatively straightforward:

• 1. Create a handwriting sample ("quick brown fox" is a good start)
• 2. Scan and import into a vector-graphics editing program (Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator).
• 3. Run the raster-to-vector conversion (awesome!). Be sure to play with brightness/contrast thresholding for the optimal result.
• 4. Break out each letter into a separate SVG file
• 5. Clean up SVG paths, eliminating unwanted "holes" (I haven't done this yet, as it seems tedious, especially with a laptop trackpad!)
• 6. Install FontForge (warning: Linux only*)
• 7. Import and construct your font, one letter at a time from the SVG files

I'll probably keep playing with it. At least until I have all lower-case letters completed. Yeah, it's dorky, but it's fun

* VirtualBox + seamless mode is your friend

[Nick]

That's actually kinda cool.

[zourtney]

I just attempted to "fix" Illustrator's paths on the letter "a". It turns out that it's really weird -- it sometimes seems control points reside on the opposite side of the image(?) I think it will be easier to create the path manually, using the original as a tracing guide.

This is somewhat disappointing, but not at all surprising. Of course, I could just leave it as-is. It kind of has that ancient-parchment look.

[zourtney]

I had some time to spare, so I finished up lowercase letters a-z. They aren't cleaned up, but it's kind of fun to see my sloppy-pen handwriting in Word.



The spacing looks fairly natural in most cases. Scaling is somewhat natural, but could use a little work (o's too big, g's too small, etc).

I do kind of wish you could add a little variety in there...the easiest way to spot a "handwriting font" is to see if two instances of the same letter are drawn identically. Anyway, I'm not sure if I'll have enough inspiration to make a full-fledged font. But it's kind of fun to mess with.

[Nick]

You could start a service turning peoples handwriting into a font!

"Put that personal tough into your letter head."

[zourtney]

Yeah, that would be kind of a fun, niche service to provide. Considering the amount of time it seems to be taking, I'd have to charge (or like the person enough to do it for free) With some practice, you could probably knock one out in a day.

Oh, and I kind of forgot to mention the fact, yeah, my handwriting sucks.

Anyway, I'm trying to go through the letters and clean them up. Most letters can be created with an SVG path with less than 10 control points. I'll have to do a side-by-side comparison to see if the "cleaned up" version looks less authentic.

Fortunately, not many people ask what I did over the weekend anymore 

[zourtney]

I finished the moderately tedious process of cleaning up the vector files for the font. Still, I've only bothered to do lowercase. With all the tweaks I made, I'm surprised at how much like the original it looks. This will still not look good enlarged, but for different reasons now..!

Updated, with simpler paths


Original


It still has the same scaling and spacing inconsistencies. I was just trying to see if cleaning up the vector files was worth it. I'm going for "yes."

As to whether or not continuing with this little experiment is worth it or not...hmmmmm....?