Design your Own Fonts
This is a very simple method to design your own fonts/dingbats from
handwriting or drawrings (instructions courtesy of dickson!)
first of all you need the right equipement:
pen
paper
computer (DUH!!!)
scanner (back & white or color doesnt matter)
Adobe Streamline
Fontagrapher (any version)
Adobe Photoshop (Optional)
1. draw your alphabet from A-Z, numbers, and any
speacial characters that you want or you can look at the keyboard and check to see which
characters you left out etc.
2. after you finish drawing out your alphabets, pop
it into your scanner and scan it in black and white. scan the image directly into adobe
streamline, or if you want you can scan it into photoshop and malipulate the image a bit
to suit your needs. otherwise, scanning the letters into streamline directly is fine. be
sure that when you scan, set the scanning resolution to 300 dpi.
if you scanned your alphabets into photoshop, goto step 3. if
you scanned it into streamline directly, skip step 3 and 4 then proceed with step 5.
3. you can clean up your scanned letters in
photoshop by erasing portions you dont want, or you can add stuph to the letters and make
it look even more kewl. after you have done with the necessary editing, grayscale the
image and save it as a PSD. make sure that there are no layers or all the layers are
flattened or else you wont be able to do the next step properly.
this is the image of the alphabets my friend have drawn. this
was scanned into photoshop for editing and cleaning. click here to see a screenshot
4. now close photoshop and launch up streamline.
after streamline goto has loaded, goto the menu File ==> Open and choose the PSD that
contains your alphabet.
5. now you see your alphabet in streamline infront
of you. what you are gonna do now is to simply convert your scanned alphabet into a EPS
which is basically a format at which you can make your alphabet into a True Type Font. (i
dont wana go on with the technical details because it gets lengthy and boring :p)
now goto the menu Options ==> Conversion Setup. the options on that window is quite
self explanitory, but i will review them here.
6. after you are all done fiddling with the
conversion setup. now its time to convert the image from pixels to actual lines. goto the
menu File ==> Convert. as you will see that streamline traces your image and redraw
them as lines according to the the convertion setup. you might want to play with the
conversion setup awhile until you get the result you want.
7. after the conversion is done, save the converted
image as a Illustrator EPS.
8. fire up fontagrapher. goto the menu File =>
New. select a empty box, preferably the ones with the "**" above it. goto the
menu File => Import => EPS. then choose your EPS file. some people like having other
programs running such as the program that they drew their font in and fontagrapher loaded
at the same time, copying and pasting the characters directly from one program to another
instead of importing from a file. i like importing the characters from a EPS file because
windows 95 sucks, running too many programs at once crashes my computer.
9. now you have imported your EPS. as you can see,
all the alphabets that you have drawn is crammed into a small tiny box. you now hafta edit
the box by double clicking it. now select a letter by dragging a window across the whole
letter so you select all the points.
10. now goto the menu Edit => Cut and paste it
into the appropriate boxes. for example, if you cut the letter 'A', then highlight the box
with the letter 'A' above it and paste it. if you are lazy kind like me, you can use these
keyboard shortcuts to cut 'n' paste.
CUT - CTRL X COPY - CTRL C PASTE - CTRL V
11. after you have finished pasting your alphabets
to the correct boxes, you now will make it into TTF. first of all save your font first,
after you've done that, goto the menu File => Generate Font Files, choose PC, TrueType,
then click Generate. Now you have made a font that you can actually use!! to install the
font copy it into the windows/font dir. you now can type it, print it and show it off to
your friends. hehe :)
